BDIM and value-based software engineering

I hosted Vladimir Tosic from NICTA, Australia at HP labs last week. He gave a talk introducting NICTA, the Australian center of excellence for ICT and presenting his current research directions. Vladimir is a very prolific researcher. Among the various things he's looking at, his attempt to bring together BDIM and value-based software engineering got my attention. Value-based software engineering's goal, according to Stefan Biffl and his co-authors is "to develop models and measures of value which are of use for managers, developers and users as they make tradeoff decisions between, for example, quality and cost or functionality and schedule – such decisions must be economically feasible and comprehensible to the stakeholders with differing value perspectives. [...] VBSE extends the merely technical ISO software engineering definition with elements not only from economics, but also from cognitive science, finance, management science, behavioural sciences, and decision sciences, giving rise to a truly multi-disciplinary framework." This link definitely deserves some investigation. On my part, I'm going to start by looking at business-driven software testing, that is driving the design of test suites not from the point of view of coverage, but from the point of view of the value to the business expressed through successive refinement of requirements.