Return on Software: Maximizing the Return on Your Software Investment

Summary

Optimization analysis is useful when the objective functions being studied have two or more competing components: One of the components increases as the decision variable increases, whereas the other component decreases. Optimization balances these competing components to find the point where overall performance is most favorable.

There are two ways of finding the optimum point on a single alternative with a single decision variable. The brute-force approach is to run different sample values on the function and narrow in on the best result. The elegant approach uses differential calculus; the objective function will be at a minimum or maximum whenever its first derivative equals zero.

To find the optimum point when there is more than ...