Given two software projects X and Y relating to some Product A –
- Project X offers some new capabilities.
- Project Y offers incremental capabilities.
Y’s features can be measured: we know its uses, access patterns, etc. Product A understands how to monitor Y and quantify its improvements.
Project X offers totally new capabilities; these capabilities will combine with existing project A capabilities as well as other, unplanned, ways. How do you quantify the unexpected ways that users will use it in? In particular, what kind of ROI can you reckon for Project X, what kind of % improvement to your customer base will happen?
An example might be: do you maintain a library in your standard company components, or do you build a totally new one?
Or, do you continue working with your PHP installation, or do you make a leap to Haskell?
Or, do you deliver an improved feature, or a totally new feature?
A glance through the software engineering Google search seems to only give standard source code metrics; product management search gives only standard business metrics.