The information technology field's accelerating rate of change makes feedback control essential for organizations to sense, evaluate, and adapt to changing value propositions in their competitive marketplace. Although traditional project feedback control mechanisms can manage the development efficiency of stable projects in well-established value situations, they do little to address the project's actual value, and can lead to wasteful misuse of an organization's scarce resources.

The value-based software engineering agenda seeks to integrate value considerations into current and emerging software engineering principles and practices, while developing an overall framework in which they compatibly reinforce each other.