ABSTRACT
This chapter defines what the author means by the term business value of software, and it demonstrates how businesses are suffering through their inadequate management of their software value assets and flows. The chapter describes that software in an organization has a software value life cycle. In the definition of the business value of software, it describes the accumulations of the asset value of software through the incremental flow of changes to the software. From a portfolio management perspective, an organization has a collection of software applications, a portfolio, which individually and often collectively has value. There are two main methodologies for developing software that are prevalent today: Waterfall and Agile. Agile appealed to a wide range of software developers and testers who were feeling the weight and, some might say, futility of the Waterfall methodology. In some instances of Agile methodologies lean software engineering principles have been adopted implicitly.
