Thesis (doctoral)--University of Oulu, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Technology in Information Technology in the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technonlogy / The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in business has evolved to such an extent that many organizations (if not all) rely on Information Technology (IT) systems to better manage their processes, get competitive advantage, improve performance (efficiency and effectiveness), provide quality services on time and most importantly to keep customers happy. This has changed the way people communicate and conduct businesses, lowering processing cost, time and improving a return on investment. Therefore, high quality software systems are essential. Organizations adopt Agile Scrum methodologies in order to develop applications that help them to obtain a return on investment quickly, to improve customer satisfaction and to maintain competitive advantage. However, the IT industry is yet to develop error-free software that meets the expected quality standards. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the extent to which software quality assurance measures can be understood and applied to maximize the quality of software projects developed under Scrum methodology. A qualitative research method informed by an interpretive approach was used to collect and analyse data. Following the purposive sampling technique, five Scrum teams operating in different environments and two academics from one academic institution were interviewed. Structuration Theory (ST) was then used as an analytical framework to analyse data and to improve the understanding of Scrum practices and related quality assurance (QA) processes. Drawing on the major terms of ST, the contextual terrain of the Scrum development process was mapped. It reflected that rules are important aspects of Scrum functions. However, rules are not as strictly applied as in the traditional methodologies. The developer skill, project type and size have a direct influence on the practice/s. In Scrum, rules are flexible in that they can be modified to meet the environment and conditions of the team. Equally significant are resources, most particularly, time and the human resources in the form of developers and Scrum leaders. Otherwise, unit testing, user acceptance testing, close collaboration and code reviews were perceived as the most important practices in Scrum projects. In view of the findings, recommendations can be summed up into 4 main points; (1) that to ensure quality assurance in Scrum, Scrum teams, especially team leaders, should enforce compliance to standards, regardless of time pressures and tight deadlines; (2) It seems that the practice of working with the client to test final products as a quality assurance mechanism is working for all parties. This practice is encouraged and must be maintained; (3) Code reviews must be enforced, and that organisations invest in resources including the constant training of developers; (4) Project product owners, project managers, team leaders and business analysts should regularly meet with the user to verify requirements prior to the implementation phase. Active stakeholder involvement can minimize development costs and time.

Context. Agile software development mainly focuses on value creation, and the first principle of theAgile Manifesto is to deliver a valuable software to customers. In spite of the great significance of value,there are few studies investigated what value is from the perspective of industry practitioners. Objectives. In this study we perform a replication study about value definitions, usage, andmeasurements in China and make a comparative analysis with the similar study did in Sweden. Theprimary objectives of this study are to: a) identify value aspects from Chinese software organizations;b) list and describe activities to achieve or maximize the value aspects, and also with the measurements;c) find the similarities and differences between China and Sweden. Methods. The data was collected by using the semi-structured interviews from 30 participants in 20Chinese agile software development organizations. We utilized the content analysis and the Statisticsmethods to analyze the 30 data points. Results. The participants identified 18 value aspects and prioritized them, and the value aspects wereanalyzed by domains and roles. The three most important value aspects are the Delivery process w.r.t.time, Organization, and Team members; different domain focused on different value aspects; the projectmanager concerned more about the Delivery process w.r.t. time, Organization, and Team members,while the product owners focused more on Customer satisfaction. Then, we list and described theactivities to achieve or maximize the value aspects, described some methods and strategies tomeasure/assure/evaluate them. Most of the activities were related to agile practices and the mostactivities were used to achieve the Delivery process w.r.t. time. Finally, we presented the similaritiesand differences between those value results from China and Sweden, the most important difference isthat the Swedish participants put the Customer value perspective at the first place, while Chineseparticipants would like to balance the value between Customer and Internal Business. Conclusions. We concluded that: 1) the Chinese participants thought that the key success factor of asoftware product was to delivery it with high quality to customers on time; 2) the main activities toachieve value were related to agile practices, and some participants used some tools to assure projectprocess; 3) For better communications and collaborations between Chinese and Swedish softwarecompanies, we recommend: a) for Chinese companies, they need to i) concern more about Customerperspective than before; ii) understand the core concepts of agile methods and their using contexts forflexible application; iii) transfer from traditional organization architecture to project-based organizationarchitecture; b) for Swedish companies, they need to i) focus more on Internal business perspective; ii)use some tools and methods to achieve their value aspects; iii) find a suitable way to collaborate betweenagile teams and non-agile teams.

Syftet med arbetet var att ta reda på om den ökade tidsåtgången som parprogrammeringen leder till uppvägs av de fördelar som den genererar i jämförelse med enskild programmering där arbetet delas mellan två programmerare och sedan integreras. I arbetet presenteras resultatet från en enkätundersökning som sju personer från fyra olika företag i Sverige har besvarat. Samtliga personer som besvarat enkäten har arbetat både med enskild programmering och parprogrammering. Vårt arbete bidrar till forskningsområdet programvaruteknik som intresserar sig för mjukvaruutvecklingsmetoder. På senare tid har detta forskningsområde också intresserat sig för lättrörlig mjukvaruutveckling där utvecklingsmetoden Extreme Programming (XP) ingår. XP tillämpar parprogrammering och är en mjukvaruteknisk metod som har att göra med klassisk mjukvaruteknik som bl.a. utgår ifrån kodkvalite och samspel mellan utvecklare. (Rittenbruch m.fl, 2002) I den litteratur vi läst har det presenterats en undersökning som gjorts i USA om parprogrammering. I den konstaterades att detta arbetssätt ger en ökad tidsåtgång och det framkom också ett antal fördelar med att programmera i par. Vi har utgått ifrån tidsåtgången och fördelarna när vi gjorde vår enkätundersökning. Vi fann att vår undersökning styrker de fördelar som finns med parprogrammering, men däremot bekräftar inte undersökningen att tidsåtgången ökar. Samtliga i undersökningen tycker att kodkvalitén förbättrats, dvs bättre struktur och design samt mindre fel på koden. Sammanhållningen och kommunikationen har blivit bättre och fler programmerare är involverade i samma kod. Detta innebär att projektgruppen inte påverkades så mycket när en person lämnar projektet. Det har också framkommit att parprogrammering inte är lämpligt att använda vid enklare uppgifter.

På senare tid har agila systemutvecklingsmetoder trätt fram på marknaden, metoder som värderar flexibilitet, kundmedverkan och fokus på utvecklingsteamet och fungerande mjukvara snarare än fokus på utvecklingsverktygen och dokumentation. Vi vet dock inte vilken typ av systemutvecklingsmetod som verkligen är bättre än den andra. Den här uppsatsen består av en historisk översikt av systemutvecklingsmetoder och en undersökning kring graden av belåtenhet med olika typer av systemutvecklingsmetoder och attityden till de agila värderingarna. Genom en kvantitativ studie har svenska organisationer som utövar systemutveckling tillfrågats angående detta. Resultaten är inte helt säkra, men anspelar på att utövare av mer traditionella systemutvecklingsmetoder var något mer nöjda med sin metod än utövare av agila metoder var, men de agila utövarna var istället mer nöjda med hur deras metod hjälper dem med att tillgodose kundernas behov och önskemål än de traditionella utövarna var. Båda typerna av systemutvecklare var mer positiva till de agila värderingarna än deras motsatser, men de agila metodutövarna var positiva till en större utsträckning. / Recent times have seen the emergence of agile software development methods, valuing flexibility, customer collaboration, and focus on the development team and working software rather than focus on tools and documentation. What is unknown is which type of software development method is really better than the other. This thesis consists of a historical overview of software development methods and an investigation of the level of satisfaction with different types of software development methods and the attitude towards the agile values. Through a quantitative study, Swedish software development organizations have been heard regarding these issues. The results, although not fully statistically supported, indicate that practisers of more traditional software development methods were slightly more satisfied with their methods than practisers of agile methods were, but the agile method practisers were instead more satisfied with how their method helped them in satisfying their customers’ wants and needs than the traditional method practisers were. Both types of software developers were more positive towards the agile values than their counterparts, but the practisers of agile software development methods were so to a greater extent.

The diploma thesis deals with implementation of Agile Project Management Approach for smaller software projects of the department ATS of the office HTS CZ of the corporation Honeywell. The ATS department is a part of the Aerospace division, focused at aviation. For implementation of new approach there was used the agile methodology Scrum and the project management standard PMBoK.

Background. Software companies make frequent development in their software products to improve their quality. Agile software development (ASD) helps in the rapid delivery of the software product with consistent quality to the customer. Agile Software development shares a lot of characteristics with knowledge-intensive works, and it also needs lot of knowledge from different domains of both human and com- puting domains. Knowledge is defined as a belief of one individual capability for an effective action. Tacit knowledge is a category of the knowledge management which is defined an individuals’ memory, action or beliefs. Moreover, tacit knowledge plays a crucial role in ASD. However, tacit knowledge is hard to transfer among team mem- bers as tacit knowledge is based on an individual experience. Tacit knowledge is not documented for further reference so there is a need to study how efficiently can tacit knowledge is currently being transferred in the industry, what challenges are being faced in tacit knowledge transfer and the mitigation strategies used to overcome the tacit knowledge transfer challenges. Objectives. In this present thesis, we focused on how tacit knowledge is being transferred among team members in agile software development. Objective 1: To identify the current tacit knowledge transfer mechanism in agile software development. Objective 2: To identify challenges in managing tacit knowledge transfer between team members in Agile software development. Objective 3: To explore mitigation strategies to overcome the challenges faced dur- ing tacit knowledge transfer. Methods. In this study, SLR and interviews were implemented to achieve the objective. SLR was used to achieve the first two objectives, and interviews were conducted to achieve all the objectives. Results. From SLR, a total of 21 challenges and 12 transfer mechanisms have been identified whereas, from the interviews, a total of 12 challenges, 8 transfer mecha- nisms, and 7 mitigation strategies have been identified. There were new challenges and transfer mechanisms identified in both research methods. Some of the transfer mechanisms consist of daily scrum calls and day-to-day forums among the teams. Both the research methods’ results indicate that one of the most challenging parts while transferring tacit knowledge is the lack of critical thinking with human orienta- tion. Based on the interviews, some of the mitigation strategies such as regular sprint meetings, and online whiteboarding were considered to overcome the tacit knowledge transfer challenges. Conclusions. Based on the challenges identified from the interview, it is evident that teams working in distributed teams are facing more challenges in transferring tacit knowledge, and tacit knowledge transfer sessions should be recorded to reduce the challenges.

No description available.

Cinnober is an organization that develops advanced software solutions for financial institutions. As a part of the technology toolkit used at Cinnober there is a web framework with which GUI development can be driven from the data available on the server, through configuration rather than development. Rather than having the user interface emerge as a result of technology and available data, they would like to explore a software development model driven by user centered design. Cinnober practices scrum, an agile software development framework, which has proven difficult to integrate with user centered design. This thesis strives to identify suitable methods for performing user centered design in the environment of agile software development. A development process based on scrum, lean UX, staggered sprints and the effect map was then utilized and evaluated in a short development project at Cinnober. Utilizing and evaluating those methods yielded valuable input which can be of use in future development efforts. While there was plenty of positive feedback from the development team there was also some room for improvement. Additionally, there are quite a few pieces missing in order for the utilized development process to cover all aspects considered important in one of the most commonly cited definitions of user centered design.

Os Métodos Ágeis surgiram no final da década de 90, como uma alternativa aos métodos prescritivos de desenvolvimento de software. Eles propõem uma nova abordagem de desenvolvimento, eliminando gastos com documentação excessiva e burocrática, enfatizando a interação entre as pessoas e as atividades que efetivamente trazem valor ao cliente. Nos últimos anos, diversos princípios e práticas baseados na indústria de manufatura foram incorporadas pelos Métodos Ágeis de desenvolvimento de software. Um dos princípios absorvidos é o de melhorar a eficácia de uma organização através de melhorias globais. Embora este princípio seja bem difundido nos Métodos Ágeis, utilizá-lo não é uma tarefa fácil. Nem sempre é fácil ter uma visão global do processo de desenvolvimento. Além disso, para realizar melhorias globais é necessário descobrir a causa para possíveis problemas, o que também pode ser uma tarefa difícil. Esse trabalho investiga duas abordagens da indústria de manufatura que enxergam uma organização como um sistema no qual todas as partes são inter-relacionadas. Com base nelas, três abordagens de desenvolvimento de software existentes são analisadas. Finalmente, um estudo comparativo foi feito para avaliar as principais características dos métodos de desenvolvimento estudados. Esse estudo estende o trabalho feito por Abrahamssom et al., no livro Agile Software Development: Current Research and Future Directions, avaliando o desempenho dos métodos seguindo o arcabouço proposto pelos mesmos autores. / Agile methods appeared in the late 90\'s as an alternative approach to the classic prescriptive planning approaches to software development. They propose a new style of development, eliminating excessive and bureaucratic documentation, and emphasizing the interactions between people collaborating to achieve high productivity and deliver high-quality software. In the last few years, several principles and practices based on the manufacturing industry were incorporated by Agile software development. One of the principles absorbed is to improve the effectiveness of an organization through an overall improvement. Although this principle is quite widespread in Agile Methods, using it is not an easy task. It is not easy to get the big picture of the development process. Moreover, to achieve overall improvements is necessary to discover the cause of possible problems, which can also be a difficult task. This work investigates two approaches in the manufacturing industry that shares the assumption that the whole organization is focused on overall throughput, not on micro-optimization. Based on then, three approaches to existing software development are analyzed. Finally, a comparative study was done to assess the main characteristics of the studied methods. This study extends the work done by Abrahamssom et al. In the book Agile Software Development: Current Research and Future Directions, evaluating the performance of the methods following the framework proposed by the same authors.