Business Value is Always the Goal

When you are creating software for a business, the creation of business value is always the goal. In general there are only two ways that business value is created. Either you are saving money because you make a process more efficient or you create new revenue with a new process, product, or feature.


As the goal of software development, it means that we are not even considering the qualities of systems that software developers are generally concerned with. So it makes absolutely no sense to create a system that is really easy to maintain if that increases the cost of the system so that it doesn't provide business value. These qualities have to be understood as constraints and they are understood in terms of trade-offs. If you are absolute about them, then you will have a hard time creating a successful system. This seems completely reasonable and obvious, but it happens all the time. Always remember: the cost of the system has to be less than the business value created.