Family of Evaluation Strategies: A Practical Case for Comparing and Adopting Strengths

Abstract

Companies commonly establish and pursue business goals. A goal states a purpose. In the Software Engineering literature, different evaluation purposes such as to understand, monitor, improve, control, compare and select are mentioned. Considering that these purposes share distinctive and common aspects, in the present work, we include a categorization that helps a better understanding of them. On the other hand, to reach the purpose of a goal, a suitable strategy should be chosen. A strategy describes a particular course of action by means of process and method specifications. We have envisioned different strategies for different evaluation goal purposes. Therefore, in this paper we also present some strategies, which are part of a family of strategies driven by measurement and evaluation activities. Specifically, we document evaluation strategies for the monitoring, improving, and comparing and adopting purposes. In addition, we illustrate the comparing and adopting strategy applied to four social network mobile apps.