A Context-Aware Decision Framework for Software Service Maturity

Software organisations increasingly rely on maturity and performance frameworks — DORA, SRE, CMMI, COBIT, and others — to assess engineering health and guide investment decisions. Most share a structural assumption: that maturity can be assessed on a universal scale, independent of business context. While contingency theory has long established that organisational effectiveness is context-dependent, and situational maturity models have been proposed at the organisational level, this insight has not been operationalised as a calibration mechanism for engineering maturity assessment at the individual service level. This paper argues that context-blind maturity assessment risks misallocating engineering investment and proposes the Service Maturity Framework (SMF), a context-aware, multi-dimensional decision framework that introduces business context as the calibrating dimension for all other maturity signals. Rather than a measurement problem requiring better scales, the paper frames this as a translation problem: how to derive appropriate operational thresholds from strategic context. The framework uses three strategic categories — Optimise, Constrain, and Defer — grounded in Wardley's value chain evolution model and Kano's theory of attractive quality, to set differentiated maturity expectations per service. The classifier is two-stage by design: a Wardley × Kano base posture corrected by a measured escalation stage handling regulatory exposure, architectural coupling, and market thinness, with an explicit falsifiable bet that escalation governs a minority of services. The paper articulates four design requirements, defines the unit of analysis, presents the classification mechanism, and outlines a research agenda for the formal design and evaluation of the framework using Design Science Research methodology.