Att förutspå framtiden är något som är av vikt för organisationer som vill hålla sig ajour med dagens snabbt föränderliga värld. Det är viktigt för företag att befinna sig på marknaden vid rätt tidpunkt och med rätt typ av tjänst eller produkt. Organisationer tenderar att investera stora summor på uppdaterade erbjudanden på marknaden. För att organisationer ska hålla sig uppdaterade på marknaden krävs det anpassning för att möta nya förväntningar. För att kunna agera på de nya möjligheterna har agil arbetsmetod blivit ett trendigt tillvägagångssätt. En agil organisation kan effektivt ta hänsyn till förändringar i marknaden, kundbehov och teknologi. Ett annat område som har ökat i behov för företag är tjänstedesign. Behovet har uppkommit genom nya krav på ökat värde på tjänster, ökade förväntningar hos kund och digitaliseringens påverkan på tjänster. Genom att arbeta med- och studera kunden, kan företag generera kvalitativa tjänster. Det leder vidare till en ökad förmåga att hitta marknadsmöjligheter Idag saknas studier som kombinerar trendspaning med agil arbetsmetod och tjänstedesign. Genom att studera de tre ämnesområdena i den teoretiska referensramen, har studien ändamålet att generera en modell som kombinerar dem.  Syftet med studien är att identifiera dagens metoder och arbetsprocesser kring trendspaning. Vidare kommer vi lyfta fram faktorer som har betydelse vid en trendspaning. Utöver trendspaning kommer studien även att inkludera perspektiven tjänstedesign och agil arbetsmetod. Den agila metoden kommer fokusera på Scaled Agile Framework. För att slutligen ge ett förslag på hur perspektiven kan integreras med trendspaning. Syftet med studien blir slutligen ge en rekommendation på en metod kring trendspaning som ska framtidssäkra en svensk bankverksamhet.  Forskningsfrågan besvaras genom att koppla det teoretiska ramverket till 12 kvalitativa intervjuer. Teorin och empirin sammanställs i analysen för att utveckla studiens slutliga modell. Modellen besvarar forskningsfrågan: ”Hur kan en lämplig trendspaningsmetod i en svensk bankverksamhet med fokus på agil arbetsmetod och tjänstedesignmetod utformas?”. Studien bidrar till en djupare förståelse av trendspaning, agil arbetsmetod och tjänstedesign genom en djup kunskap och en koppling mellan de tre ämnesområdena och deras samband. Slutligen belyser studien vikten av en gemensam arbetsmetod, en gemensam plattform och en stegvis process på ett företag.

This thesis was done in collaboration with Volvo Cars to inspect their risk management process in light of their recent change to an agile way of working. The question was if their actual risk management differentiates from their directive and if the company could in any way improve their agile risk management. By having qualitative semi-structured interviews with employees in the IT section of the company, we got the picture that not many knew about the IT Risk Management Directive that explains the process, but they are still working within its guidelines. Other sections of the company that is still working traditionally might also benefit from changing to an agile way. However, that would depend on the size of their projects and what kind of work they do since the agile methodology is more turned towards smaller projects that can change direction quickly.

Can the Product Development Process at Tcom be improved by moving usability testing in-house? The interest in this question lies in the agile transformation Tcom initiated in early 2018. Once agile, the company’s interests are efficiency and increasing quality. One way of increasing the quality of their digital products is to improve the process behind it, where involving users in usability testing should be central in an iterative development process. A qualitatively driven mixed methods research approach facilitated the acquisition of the empirical data necessary to successfully answer the research question. The culture of Tcom’s usability testing was collected via a survey. The survey was complemented with the current testing process through four interviews and two observations of usability tests, one internal and one external. Parameters between the two tests were compared and weighted against each other. The main findings reveal that the internal process shows promising characteristics. It is, up to, 1/10 as expensive per participant, has a quicker call-to-test-time, facilitates transparency, and allows refinement of the process. With the main findings in hand, the conclusion points to the fact that usability testing should be composed and conducted by Tcom itself. The greatest challenge to such a change is how a usability perspective can be integrated into the Scrum methodology. / Kan produktutvecklingsprocessen på Tcom förbättras genom att flytta användbarhetstester internt? Intresset i denna fråga ligger i den agila transformation som företaget påbörjade tidigt 2018. Effektivitet och kvalitet är centrala förbättringspunkter med det agila arbetssättet. Ett sätt att öka kvaliteten på deras digitala produkter är att förbättra processen bakom, där involveringen av användare i användbarhetstester bör vara centralt i ett iterativt arbetsförlopp. En kvalitativt driven mixed methods research metod tillämpades för att förvärva den empiriska data som krävdes för att framgångsrikt besvara frågeställningen. Tcoms användbarhetstestkultur undersöktes via en enkät. Denna metod kompletterades med 4 intervjuer och 2 observationer av användbarhetstest, ett externt och ett internt. Parametrar från de två observationerna ställdes mot varandra. De centrala upptäckterna avslöjar att den interna processen uppvisar lovande egenskaper. Den är upp till en tiondel så kostsam per deltagare, har snabbare beställning-till-test-tid, tillåter transparens, och möjliggör förbättring av själva testprocessen. Med hänsyn till huvudfynden kan vi konkludera att användbarhetstest bör utformas och utföras av Tcom själva. Den största utmaningen till en sådan förändring ligger i hur ett sådant användbarhetsperspektiv ska implementeras i det agila ramverket Scrum.

This study aims to discover and create an overview of how model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is utilized in Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) settings. The overall goal is to identify the challenges and opportunities, the best practices and to find different publication trends that exist for this combination. The combination is interesting to investigate given that MBSE is considered to traditionally be a waterfall-based way of working, whereas SAFe is an Agile way of working. The study was executed by conducting a systematic mapping study. The results we found that were linked to the publication trends where that the number of primary studies investigating the combination of MBSE and SAFe were relatively low, and that the amount of grey literature that were found were higher than peer-reviewed primary studies. The best practices of the combination of MBSE and SAFe were identified by analyzing different methods, tools, and processes. Identified challenges and opportunities of this combination were that it provides: enhanced collaboration and communication capabilities, centralized information about the system under development, reduction of complexity, and decreased development time.

Today, agile development is broadly used within both small and large organizations worldwide. Transitioning to agile development in a large organization is a complex task that requires support from everyone in it. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a framework meant to help integrate agile development within all parts of an organization. Regularly conducted assessments of how well an organization has integrated agile development can be a way to make sure the transition is happening as intended. These kinds of assessments are often called agile maturity assessments. SAFe includes such an assessment, but since the assessment is based on thoughts and reflections from members in the organization, doing the assessment can be difficult and may give unreliable results. This study aims to explore one way to support the assessment with objective data by generating visualizations of issue tracking data extracted from Jira and Github. The Inductive visual Miner, a plugin in the process mining software ProM, was used for the visualizations. A case study was conducted at the IT department of the Swedish Tax Agency. A slightly modified version of the methodology called the PM2 methodology was used to conduct the study. The modified methodology included six stages; a planning stage, a data extraction stage, a data processing stage, a mining and analysis stage, an evaluation stage and lastly, an improvement stage where an attempt was made to improve the visualizations based on the analysis and the evaluation. The planning stage was used to gain information about the work processes in the organization and what kind of data that may exist in the chosen data sources. A set of goal questions connected to the agile maturity assessment were generated, which the visualizations were expected to provide answers to. Data from six teams were then used to generate the visualizations. At first, the visualizations were explored and later evaluated in collaboration with the SCRUM-master in each team. The results in this study show that visualizations generated from issue tracking data using the Inductive visual Miner can be used to answer questions about time and order of events that are related to the agile maturity assessment within SAFe. However, additional analysis and reflections are needed to draw conclusions about the agile maturity from the information obtained from the visualizations. A set of requirements for the data used to generate this kind of visualizations is also proposed. The requirements were based on the results from all stages. / Agil utveckling används idag flitigt inom både små och stora organisationer över hela världen. Att gå över till agil utveckling i en stor organisation är en komplex uppgift som kräver stöd från alla inom den. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) är ett ramverk avsett att göra det lättare att integrera agil utveckling inom alla delar av en organisation. Regelbundet genomförda utvärderingar av en organisations användning av agil utveckling kan vara ett sätt att se till att övergången sker som planerat. Dessa utvärderingar kallas ofta agila mognadsmätningar. I SAFe ingår en sådan utvärdering, men eftersom utvärderingen baseras på tankar och reflektioner från medlemmar i organisationen kan det vara komplicerat att utföra utvärderingen och den kan ge icke pålitliga resultat. Syftet med denna studie är att utforska ett sätt att stödja den agila mognadsmätningen med objektiv data genom att generera visualiseringar av ärendehanteringsdata som extraherats från Jira och Github. En plugin kallad Inductive visual Miner i process mining-verktyget ProM används för denna visualisering. En fallstudie genomfördes på Skatteverkets IT-avdelning. En något modifierad version av metoden kallad PM2 -metoden användes för att genomföra studien. Den modifierade metoden inkluderade sex steg; ett planeringsskede, ett datautvinningsskede, ett databearbetningsskede, ett process mining- och analysskede, ett utvärderingsskede och slutligen ett förbättringsskede där ett försök till att förbättra visualiseringarna utifrån analysen och utvärderingen genomfördes. Planeringsstadiet användes för att få information om arbetsprocesserna i organisationen och vilken typ av data som kan finnas i de valda datakällorna. En uppsättning målfrågor kopplade till den agila mognadsmätningen formulerades. Detta var frågor som visualiseringarna förväntades ge svar på. Data från sex team användes sedan för att generera visualiseringarna. Visualiseringarna undersöktes först noggrant och utvärderades sedan i samarbete med SCRUM-mastern i varje team. Resultaten i denna studie visar att visualiseringar genererade från ärendehanteringdata med hjälp av verktyget Inductive visual Miner kan användas för att svara på frågor om tid och ordning av händelser i arbetsprocessen, som är relaterade till den agila mognadsmätningen inom SAFe. Ytterligare analyser och reflektioner behövs dock för att dra slutsatser om den agila mognaden utifrån informationen som erhålls från visualiseringarna. En uppsättning krav för den data som ska användas för att generera denna typ av visualiseringar föreslås också. Dessa krav är baserade på resultaten från alla steg i metoden.

The popularity of agile methodologies is steadily increasing. This study is an intent to balance the agile change literature with a psychological perspective and quantitative measures of an agile change made within a Swedish organization. Organizational change recipients’ beliefs (discrepancy, appropriateness, valence, efficacy, & principal support) and trust in management were measured in an online survey to see how well these variables could predict a successful agile change towards transparency. The results indicate a lack of support for several previously cited success factors in the agile literature and a need for more quantitative and research-driven literature. No support could be found for a relationship between discrepancy, appropriateness, valence, principal support, trust in management, and the outcome of a successful implementation of transparency. Efficacy was found to be a significant and robust predictor of the outcome. More research is needed to ensure the generalizability of the results.

Background: The Scaled Agile Framework®(SAFe) has been adopted by many automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) for scaling their agile practices. It is one of the ways to improve and accelerate their in-house software development life cycle. Most OEMs have tailored the agile framework to fit their own needs. However, with the increasing complexity of vehicles, especially in terms of embedded software and hardware development, agile release trains (ARTs) face challenges in managing requirements throughout the vehicle development life cycle. Multiple teams working on requirements, consistency of requirements, collaboration, prioritization of requirements between teams, and changing requirements are some of the challenges faced by the SAFe practicing organizations. Objectives: This thesis examines how the requirements engineering within SAFe has been practiced inone of the automotive OEMs, and the challenges its agile release trains face. It addresses the real problems of practical interest and real-life context by interacting with the teams who have been closely working with the requirements daily. It also accumulates the impacts due to the identified challenges. Methods: This study utilizes a case study methodology, which is flexible in design, exploratory, andqualitative. This choice of research method is influenced by the scope of the study, research questions, and the degree of interaction required between us and the participants to collect the data. By conducting semi-structured interviews, a large quality of data isproduced by having a higher level of interaction with participants. The collected data is then probed for newer and unexpected responses using a thematic approach, which helps to identify patterns and themes using large and complex data. Results: This thesis summarizes the requirement engineering practices and challenges faced by theagile release trains in SAFe practicing automotive industry. We approached the agile teams directly and collected the organizational and stakeholder behavior while working with therequirements and the challenges faced. Using intrinsic data analysis, the gathered interview data is understood, and the implications are listed. This study reemphasizes that agile release trains were facing many challenges, especially in the requirements engineeringarea even though the Scaled Agile Framework is practiced. Knowledge gaps, incompleteand misunderstood customer requirements, ineffective communication, fragmented tooling, inadequate management support, and inconsistent requirement engineering practiceare some of the challenges highlighted by the agile release trains.

Organizations have always tried and pushed themselves to bring changes in how they conduct business. They do this to reach the market quickly and achieve customer satisfaction. This master thesis was conducted at a global leader transportation company, Alstom, to investigate Scaled Agile Frameworks (SAFe) adoption in their Sweden Development Centre, identifying SAFe implementation challenges in a safety-related development as a single-case study. For the thesis, two research questions were formulated to identify the implementation challenges and find their reasons. For the data collection of the thesis, semi-structured interviews, self-completion surveys, and relevant research papers were used to serve the purpose of both primary data and secondary data sources. The researchers acted as ethnographers by participating in the company’s daily events and taking notes. The analysis of the collected data was done using the triangulation approach to get reliable results. In addition, researchers also used SAFe core competency assessment to evaluate the business agility of the case organization.The analysis from the collected data resulted in five implementation challenges. The data suggested that the major challenge was insufficient training and lack of agile mindset among the team members. The case organization had invested in training and support for going through the transformation, but the agile training was interrupted in 2019. Since then, the knowledge about SAFe and the agile way of working was acquired based on learning by doing. Based on the data, the researchers concluded that lack of continuous training has resulted in the development over time of other implementation challenges like insufficient self-organization, nonoptimal team size, and lack of clarity when defining role responsibilities. The data also suggested that transparent communication between different levels may still be a challenge. The SAFe assessment that has been conducted resulted in confirm previous result that in some places complemented the identified implementation challenges.  Key Words: Scaling Agile Framework, Implementation challenges, Lean, Waterfall, Self-organization, Continuous learning culture, Safety related development, Business agility, Ethnography.

This dissertation aims to assist Agile champions in their organisations with their Agile adoption journey. Such a journey typically starts with identifying the Agile challenges and then determining how to address these challenges in their unique context (Hajjdiab & Taleb, 2011a:9). This study provides a manual together with an automated framework to showcase a list of prioritised Agile challenges and their corresponding possible solutions. Before reaching this automated framework, the research presented a comprehensive list of Agile adoption challenges, possible solutions and a mapping between them. The automated framework, also named Agile Adoption Coach (AAC), is in the form of an online tool: www.agilesense.coza/aac. The critical quantitative contribution to this study was the evaluation of the AAC by Scrum Masters and Agile coaches to determine the acceptability of the tool. The research has shown that there is, on average, an 86% acceptability rating for this tool in South Africa. / School of Computing / M. Sc. (Computing)

Agila arbetssätt och den agila filosofin har över de två senaste decennierna blivit ett självklart element I det flesta IT-systemutvecklingsprojekt. Fördelarna som följer med den agila filosofin (exempelvis ökad kundanpassning och snabbare leveranser) har bidragit till att större företag börjat att införa agila arbetssätt i hela organisationen – det vill säga inte bara i enskilda projekt. Denna idé har lett till att olika generella ramverk som benämns för Skalade agila ramverk (Scaled Agile Framework) har introducerats på marknaden. Ett par exempel på befintliga ramverk är Scrum of Scrums, LeSS, Scaled Agile Framework och Lean Scalable Agility. Av existerande ramverk är “Scaled Agile Framework” (SAFe) den mest implementerade och väletablerade. Det finns emellertid flera utmaningar med att införa SAfe i stora verksamheter. En utmaning är att skalade agila ramverk är komplexa och tar lång tid att införa. En annan utmaning är att det saknas verktyg som stöttar organisationer i deras försök att implementera ramverket. Detta är problematiskt eftersom det kan leda till en ineffektiv implementeringsprocess, högre kostnader och att vinsterna med den agila filosofin reduceras. Detta har lett oss till det problem som vi adresserar i studien; det saknas kunskap om hur bedömningsmodeller för SAFe skall designas. Problemet har sporrat oss att utföra en studie där vi, tillsammans med en organisation i näringslivet, har designat och utvärderat ett användbart och icke-komplext verktyg för bedömning av skalade agila ramverk. Syftet är med verktyget är att det skall effektivisera implementeringsprocessen av SAFe. Problemet har också legat till grund för vår forskningsfråga som lyder: Hur bör ett verktyg för bedömning av SAFe implementationer designas? För att finna svar på forskningsfrågan har vi valt att följa forskningsmetoden Action Design Research (ADR). ADR metoden vill bidra IS-forskning genom att 1) den adresserar ett problem i en specifik organisatorisk kontext genom design av en IT-artefakt samtidigt som den 2) stödjer identifiering av designprinciper. Studiens resultat visar att bedömningsmodellen fungerar, att den bidrar till att lösa det adresserade problemet samt att de designprinciper som presenteras är korrekta. / Agile methods and the agile manifesto has been for the last two decades a central focus point of software development in the world. The benefits that come with the usage of the agile philosophy (for example, increased customer adaptation and quicker deliveries) has led larger companies to try to adopt the principles on their entire organization - not only on smaller projects. This adoption has translated to the emergence of various frameworks that are generally labeled as Scaled agile frameworks. A few examples of these frameworks are Scrum of Scrums, LeSS, Scaled Agile Framework and Lean Scalable Agility. These frameworks are being widely adopted by large companies, with SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) being the most adopted on the market. However, these frameworks have become a pinnacle of complexity due to the large size of the frameworks which proves to be a challenge for the company that is using them. This is problematic because there are no real tools to evaluate the implementation of scaled agile frameworks. With no tools to use, there is a risk of having an inefficient implementation process which constitutes to higher costs and that the general benefits of Agile manifesto are lost on the way. This has led us to the problem that we’re addressing in this study: There is a lack of knowledge on how to design assessment models for the SAFe framework. This problem has spurred us into conduct a study where we, together with an organization within the IT-industry, have designed and evaluated a tool that effectively assesses the implementation of SAFe. The problem set the groundwork for our science and the question we seek to answer in this study is: How should a tool for assessment of SAFe implementation be designed? Consequently, to find answers to this question, we have chosen to use the research method Action Design Research (ADR). The method of ADR wants to contribute to IS-research by 1) To design an uncomplex tool that can help IT industry to evaluate their scaled agile framework implementation and 2) provide theoretical knowledge translated into design principles that will contribute to other design efforts in similar contexts. The result provided in this study will help show that the design knowledge works, provide rigor to the study, help solve the given problem of the study and show that the design knowledge is correct