The conceptual framework of agile software development is an ever-growing movement in the software industry. However, recent studies have shown that large, less software-focused companies, where software development is primarily used for in-house IT-solutions, struggle with giving up traditional command-control type of management. This hits hard on some of the most important principles of agile software development and in many cases this phenomenon has inevitably led to large gaps between development teams and more managerial parts of the organization. This thesis has aimed to study this gap and investigate how it affects software development teams’ ability to carry out their work. By comparing three software teams that were internally highly similar but with varying external conditions, impact on the teams’ behaviour based on their different environments was studied. The study was carried out using a multiple-case study approach with primary data sources consisting of survey gathered data from all team members and interviews with a subset of the team members. The results gathered from this study suggest that agile development teams are extremely dependent on a well-functioning interface to business related parts of an organization. Regarding teams’ ability to make decisions and being agile in their way of working, the results primarily isolate impediments with roots in an unwillingness to adhere to and lack of understanding of agile principles. In this thesis, our gathered results were also correlated with a modern framework called Flow in order to confirm its relevance regarding analyzing software development teams in large-scale environments.

Pair programming is a programming technique in which two programmers sit literally side by side working on the same task at the same computer. One member of a pair called “driver” is in charge of writing the code. The other member plays a role of “navigator”, working on the more strategic tasks, such as looking for tactical error, thinking about overall structure, and finding better alternatives. Pair programming is claimed to improve product quality, reduce defects, and shorten time to market. On the other hand, it has been criticized on cost efficiency. To increase a body of evidence regarding the real benefits of pair programming, this thesis investigates its effect on software defects and efficiency of defect correction. The analysis bases on 14-month data of project artifacts and developers' activities collected from a large Italian manufacturing company. The team of 16 developers adopts a customized version of extreme programming and practices pair programming on a daily basis. We investigate sources of defects and defect correction activities of approximately 8% of defects discovered during that time, and enhancement activities of approximately 9% of new requirements. Then we analyze whether there exists an effect of pair programming on defect rate, duration and effort of defect correction, and precision of localizing defects. The result shows that pair programming reduces the introduction of new defects when the code needs to be modified for defect corrections and enhancements.

Since last four to five years the buzz of continuous growing of agile development has been spread all around the world, specially Extreme Programming as the most important methodology of this kind. From the other side, ISO 9001:2000-TickIT Guide 5.0 has been established mainly in Europe as one of the well-known Quality Management Systems, in order to create a continuous software process improvement throughout software organizations that is mainly related to a certi¯cation process. This thesis is developed to mainly answer the question of how Extreme Programming and the standard ISO 9001:2000 with its interpretation for software development as TickIT Guide 5.0 can be used together, in order to have a continuous software process improvement with the agility to respond quickly to environment changes and satisfy the customer needs and expectations.

The emerging industrial trend towards agile software development processes brings forth new concerns, challenges as well as opportunities. One of the main concerns is with respect to the achievable quality levels of the final product, for which testing is the well-known assurance mechanism. However, it is not well defined for the community on how to perform testing using existing expertise in an agile environment. This uncertainty may create confusion and contra productivity that can lead to testing teams and their practices considered as an obstacle for full implementation of agile processes within an organisation.   This thesis outlines our current research activities towards identifying and addressing important organisational and technical challenges in the agile environment.  In this context, we propose a new role for traditional testers which will enable them to integrate into the agile team as well as to fully exploit their knowledge in the new context. We have conducted an elaborate industrial survey on the preferences and practices with respect to the contemporary aspects of software testing and identified test-driven development as an important technical area for improvement.  A systematic review on empirical evidences related to test-driven development was performed subsequently, which revealed a list of factors limiting its widespread industrial acceptance. Knowledge of testing was identified as one of those factors and was further investigated in a controlled experiment performed with undergraduate students.   Our future works aim to confirm these research findings in wider as well as industrial settings and investigate other limiting factors in detail, with the aim of providing guidelines for achieving better utilisation of testers and testing practices.

In this thesis, we tried to solve those problems by adapting agile development methods with Non-functional requirements-framework (NFR-Framework). In this thesis, we have inspected many research papers, and we have met industrial experts for feedback regarding our theoretical results. As a result of the inspection, we have been able to adapt agile development methods (extreme programming (XP)) with NFR-framework. We use XP since it is more practically oriented process than other agile development methods. In the first try for this process model, we got three alternatives for applying it. The first one is based on collecting all NFRs from the beginning of the development process. The second one is based on updating the SIG (software interdependency graph) every time we have new functional requirements (FR) and the third one is based on the incremental nature of agile development methods. Each one of these alternatives has it is own advantages and disadvantages. We tried to extract those advantages and disadvantages by brainstorming and reading research papers. The most important issue in all of the three alternatives is the applicability. Finally we got industrial feedback regarding all of them. As a result of the industrial feedback, we were able to find another alternative of how to apply the process model which is presented in 7.2.

In a rapidly growing and evolving environment, organizations must be able to reconfigure their resource base in order to adapt to changes. Several studies and research findings have already recognized knowledge management as a mean to enhance an organization’s dynamic capabilities and innovation. Effective knowledge management strategies have therefore become essential for an organization to achieve competitive advantage and finally innovate. Among the challenges for an effective knowledge management strategy, the transformation of "tacit" knowledge, that exists only in the experiences and mind of individuals and as such is difficult to be codified and transmitted, into "explicit" knowledge, which instead can be easily expressed and documented, is essential to guarantee continuous organizational learning. Modern software development processes, such as Agile, provide to organizations several knowledge sharing techniques, to aid in the transformation of knowledge from "tacit" to "explicit" one. This study aims at investigating the impact of agile knowledge sharing methodologies on both dynamic and innovation capabilities of a selected case study organization, and further analyses the factors that may be contributing to such relationship. The research is carried out by surveying a representative sample of employees of a German software development company, CompanyX. In total, 15 responses were received and a semi-structured face-to-face interview was conducted with one senior manager. Correlation and reliability testing are used as statistical tools to test both the reliability and validity of the model. Finally, the causality between the factors affecting knowledge sharing methodologies in use at CompanyX and the organization’s dynamic and innovation capabilities are analysed and compared to previous theoretical and empirical research findings. Several important observations are made as a result of our study. In particular, the overall research findings demonstrate that agile knowledge sharing methodologies can act as enhancers of CompanyX dynamic capabilities and enablers of innovation.

This thesis deals with the issue of project management in the development of custom software, particularly PRINCE2 methodology and agile approaches to software development. The work is divided into two parts. The first part is theoretical. It describes the basic concepts of project management, project history and characterizes the selected software development methodologies. The classical methods are represented by waterfall and spiral models. In the context of the agile methods are described Scrum, Extreme Programming, Kanban and Scrumban. Regarding the standards of project management this thesis describes in detail the methodology PRINCE2 which at the end of the theoretical part will be compared to the standards of PMI and IPMA. The second part is practical and describes an adaptation of PRINCE2 for small projects and helps to decide which tools of PRINCE2 are required for small projects use and which ones can be ignored. In this thesis the process of managing product delivery within the PRINCE2 methodology is replaced by the agile methodology Scrumban that is adapted for a software development within analyzed organization. The thesis focuses on a more detailed description of the methodology Scrumban, established metrics and motivation within the development team.

Drawing upon configurational theory, work group design research, virtualness concepts, and the software agility literature, the purpose of this study was to provide a starting point for theorizing about the successful configuration of globally distributed agile teams by exploring the dimensions of team structure, virtualness, and agility. Due to the complex nature of this topic, the need to examine the phenomenon within its natural setting, and the limited amount of research that has been conducted in this particular area, this study adopted an embedded multiple-case research design. The primary data collection method consisted of semi-structured interviews involving members of globally distributed agile teams within three U.S. based organizations with members located in distributed sights in multiple countries. Additional data were collected from archival records. Within-case and cross-analysis was conducted using qualitative data analysis software. This study provides a starting point for answering the question of how the configuration of globally distributed agile teams differs from the configuration of other types of globally distributed teams; it synthesizes past research and findings into a comprehensive theoretical framework; it provides a starting point for theorizing about the successful configuration of globally distributed agile teams; it helps practitioners to identify and address the challenges related to the configuration of globally distributed agile teams; and it presents a set of best practices which will inform organizations on how to configure their globally distributed agile teams.

The diploma thesis deals with an establishment of the agile and project management implementation model in a software development. Thesis analyzes these approaches in a software development team of an international organization and presents a solution of their usages in a process improvement defined by the CMMI model in selected processes areas.

The goal of master thesis "Automation of Processes in Agile Development" is research of agile metodics with a focus on development practices in the Kentico company. This thesis describes different tools used as a support of agile software development including JIRA Software and Confluence, which are used in Kentico. Important part of this thesis is analysis of the current company processes and a plan of their optimization and automation. During the implementation part a web application which displays metrics arising from analysis and optimization proposal phase is realized. This thesis also contains discussion of it's realization and possible improvements.