Monitoring performance in organizations can act as a catalyst for (i) fostering a culture of continuous improvement over-time, and (ii) achieving their overarching business goals. To this aims, organizations employ Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). However, a common pitfall is the collection of excessive data which is partially disconnected from the business goals. In this study, we propose a KPI framework in the form of a model, an associated template, and a checklist with the aim of providing guidance to practitioners for creating sound KPIs. We examine KPI development and monitoring through four case studies in the context of software systems in two organizations. Through these case studies, we evaluate our KPI framework for its utility in practice and gain insights to uncover related challenges.

To enable the people involved in a software development process to communicate and reason close to their area of knowledge, we are investigating a method to formalize and integrate knowledge of multiple domains into domain models and into specifications in terms of those domain models. For this purpose, we have previously defined a set of method objectives, and an initial version of the method –called MuDForM. This paper reports on the methodical support for using a domain model as terminology to define other specifications, and feature specifications in particular. We performed a case study to validate how well the method helps in the specification of processes and to realize the case-specific objectives of the customer. The case study pertains to the formalization of the ISO26262 standard for functional safety in the automotive domain. We found that our method is suitable to systematically formalize a process that is described in natural language, such that there is a clear separation of domain-specific concepts, unambiguous process specifications, and concepts from outside the domain and process of interest. We have extended our method with concepts, steps, and guidelines for grammatical analysis, for the formalization of constraints, and for the specification of processes. The case-specific results are the unambiguous specification of a part of the ISO26262 processes.