Determining the business value of architecture

Since there is no practice in many organizations to measure each backlog item's value, it is harder to accurately gauge actual business value. The usual way is to measure the benefits of the overall initiative in terms of revenue increment, reduction in operational cost, customer happiness, acquisition, and retention.

Agile development uses perceived business value primarily for prioritization and measuring team efficacy. The perceived business value can be identified in many ways in close collaboration between the product owner and the business. Business value is generally mapped to profit- and non-profit-related options such as increased revenue, profit margins, better customer care, higher-quality outputs, reduced risks, employee satisfaction, reduced overhead, operations cost, increased service delivery, and so on.

There are complicated methods available for measuring estimated business value, such as cost-benefit analysis...