[batista]

>Something else that can't be measured? "Business value".

If it makes money, it has business value, in my book. If it makes MORE money, it has more business value.

Actually it might be the ONLY measurable thing in the whole discussion.

[gruseom]

Well of course, but that's just a trivial restatement of the problem. Anyone can measure dollar amounts once they have them; money is a measure. The question is how to assign such amounts.

For business value to be measurable means you have a function M(x) that maps x to money. The trouble isn't with the range of that function, it's establishing what the domain is and how to compute M.

People often talk about business value on software projects as if they have such an M when they don't. What they have is an imaginary M whose domain is "what I care about" and whose output is "what I want to believe". Such discourse is dysfunctional.

The truth is that you have M for the business as a whole and maybe for specific products (though I can cite cases where even that was dubious) and it typically breaks as you try to get finer-grained.