The goal of this thesis is to describe the Application lifecycle management (ALM), with a focus on two aspects of this system. The aspects are: the application for the administration of requirements JIRA and the application for the administration of the testing system Testlink. The basis for this endeavor was my practical experience with the implementation of the process ALM in the company LMC. Application lifecycle management is an essential part of companies focused on management processes for software development and it can thus improve their features, from the defining stage to the installation in the production sphere. In my thesis I focus on the application JIRA, as a replacement tool for the administration of requirements and the application Testlink, which is software for the administration and test management. The result aims to conclude whether these applications fulfilled the initial representations of the company and the requirements in the ALM framework. An evaluation of the positive and negative aspects during implementation is being carried, with a look at the effective implementation into practice. I shall try to define the general areas where eventual failures can be detected during the implementation process and that should be carried in mind during the process.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a genre of computerized systems which allows system development corporations to efficiently and more easily manage, maintain and handle the applications lifecycle. These ALM systems have a wide variety of tools which can be integrated to enable and support collaborative work, while they act at the core of the organisation. Todays ALM systems support flexible system development methods throughout the entire development process. This paper focuses on a case-study of a Swedish business- and technology corporation and their use of two ALM systems with an aim to unravel the differences between these systems and their functionality to serve as a basis for decision making regarding their utilization of best practice with their ALM-Systems. Meanwhile we studied their approach to ALM systems to see if they were using them according to the initial idea of ALM systems. The study is of a qualitative characteristic and both semi-structured interviews with employees and self-gathered data have been used to enable our research and the creation of benchmarks. The results from our study show that the corporation uses both their ALM systems as intended from the initial idea, but we have identified a need to integrate one of the ALM systems with their costumer support portal through a web service. To enable this integration they will raise the amount of affordance to a distinctive degree due to the seamless connection and communication between the ALM system and the customer portal.

This thesis describes implementation process of issue tracking systém in company Audatex Systems s.r.o. An analysis of company's processes has been performed and ideal state after implementation is proposed. The implemented system is going to be used not only for software defect tracking, but also for company's other needs like project management and internal communication. Output of company's analysis is a list of requirements for said system and a tender is performed -- along with setting up of test environments. Process of implementation and configuration is described along with experience from implementation proces. Each of shotlisted applications is configured for company's specific needs and is evaluated with an evaluation systém, that has been created for this specific tender. Situation after implementation is descibed in conclusion of this thesis. Main benefit of this thesis lies in comparision of applications and presenting their configurations for company's needs. Two free solutions are compared along with a comercial one. In conclusion this thesis answers a question, whether a comercial solution is really needed for this specific case.

The development of Information Technology is, according to the Swedish Government, the most important area of development. The costs of IT in governmental agencies are somewhere in between 20 to 25 billion SEK, paid by taxpayers and one of the largest cost items in the Swedish governments resources. Despite this, every third Swedish governmental agency lacks an IT-strategy and is unable to meet needs for flexibility and control. The study aims to reveal barriers that prevent an active application lifecycle management (ALM) at Swedish governmental agencies and to answer the question: “How do Swedish authorities handle their proprietary applications from a lifecycle perspective; financially and technically?” The case study will be conducted at the Social Insurance Agency (SIA). The SIA distributed, in 2010, about 6 % of the Swedish GDP and is mainly funded by grants and loans from the Swedish National Debt Office. The survey will be studied from a management accounting and ALM perspective. Management accounting is the actions within organizations to achieve financial goals. ALM is the lifecycle of an application that consists of the phases; requirements specification, development, testing, deployment and maintenance. The study will also investigate the technical debt at the governmental agencies. Technical debt refers to the work which has to be completed before an application can be considered finished. The survey is a qualitative study based on interviews with an exploratory purpose. The results are generalised to reflect a greater part of the Swedish authorities and showed that Swedish governmental agencies have inadequate handling of their proprietary applications and that each application is financially linked to one or more projects simultaneously. The models made are to facilitate the understanding of the different stages of ALM in synergy with the management accounting. Theoretically, the Maintenance phase allocates approximately 90 % of the total costs, whereas in governmental agenises it stands for about 20 %. Theoretically 10 % of the total costs are allocated to the Development phase, whereas in governmental agencies the corresponding amount is 80 %. A consequence of this is increased technical debt. The technical debt at Swedish authorities is often funded with loans, which is not allowed according to the Swedish National Debt Office. The SIA exceed budgets without asking for increased funds and according to the Swedish Audit Office, so does also 1/3 of the Swedish governmental agencies, meaning that they must handle the financial complications internally by moving funds amongst different departments and projects, also spending money meant for development on maintenance. Future studies can be made as investigations on how management accounting and ALM can be implemented on a safe and effective manner in a governmental agency.

Aplicativos simples e utilizados durante um curto período de tempo são cada vez mais comuns nos dispositivos móveis. Eles perdem a utilidade uma vez que seu objetivo específico é atingido. Porém, consomem memória e processamento do dispositivo, além de seu desenvolvimento consumir recursos humanos e tecnológicos. Para minimizar esses problemas, este trabalho apresenta uma nova abordagem para geração e controle desse tipo de aplicativo por meio de uma nova arquitetura e modelo de ciclo de vida para aplicações de curta duração. A abordagem permite que os aplicativos sejam gerados automaticamente e possam ser excluídos ou gerenciados de acordo com a vontade do usuário ou por outros critérios pré-estabelecidos (e.g., por tempo transcorrido ou por localização). A arquitetura e modelos desenvolvidos foram utilizados em três aplicativos típicos com funcionalidades básicas, layout trivial e processamento leve. Essa validação demonstrou que a abordagem atende às necessidades de aplicativos em diferentes domínios (restaurantes, shoppings e eventos) e pode ser aplicado em situações com diferentes restrições de tempo e localização / Simple applications that are used over a short period of time are becoming increasingly popular on mobile devices. They lose their usefulness once their specific goal is achieved. However, they consume memory and processing of the device; furthermore, its development consume human and technological resources. To minimize these problems, this work presents a new approach for generation and control of this type of application by means of a new architecture and life cycle model for short lived applications. The approach allows applications to be automatically generated, excluded or managed according to the user\'s wishes or other pre-established criteria (e.g., by time elapsed or by location). The architecture and models developed were used in three typical applications with basic functionalities, trivial layout and light-weight processing. This validation demonstrated that the approach addresses the needs of applications in different domains (restaurants, malls and events) and can be applied in situations with different time and location constraints

Context. Application Lifecycle Management refers to the coordination of all aspects of software engineering, through a collection of integrated software development tools. More and more organizations are heavily relying on the ALM tools nowadays. Objectives. In this study we research ALM first as a business strategy, its roots, its advantages and disadvantages. As well as making a theoretical research, we seek out the setbacks of the practical side of ALM in order to find the areas needed for improvement, by investigating the ALM’s existing tools, interviewing ALM’s users, and using gained statistical data to derive practical facts about ALM. The goal of the thesis is to find out how ALM can be improved. Methods. The vast amount of sources, including articles, books, and journals is used to support our arguments and conclusions. A long online survey was carried with many participants to understand the practical side of ALM, as well as gain access to information about ALM’s setbacks. Results. The problems of ALM are recognized and named. Proposals are made in respect of how to deal with these problems. A list of what options need to be studied in the future, in order to improve the overall ALM design, and make it a powerful tool, is presented. A detailed plan for further research regarding this highly important issue is presented. Conclusions. We conclude that there are several ALM tool options on the market, all having their strengths and weaknesses. But in order for ALM to become an industrial solution and to be truly successful and effective in supporting the broader goals of the different organizations using it, the requests of the stakeholders towards deeper semantic integration between the various tool involved in the ALM processes need to be embodied in the current ALM offerings. We conclude that further research is needed in order to assess the proposals, and test the design ideas that are presented in the last chapter of this thesis. / This thesis concerns the authors and stakeholders of ALM. With the technological achievements taking place every day, and competition being very high, it is important to get the software product ready for release on time and of good quality. The current tools for managing of the application’s lifecycle are incoherent in terms of tool integration. In this thesis we describe the setbacks of ALM, according to interviewed stakeholders and authors of journals, articles and books. We conclude our thesis with the several proposed design options that may succeed in making ALM strong and consistent in the future. The proposed design mainly concerns the integration problems, and provides several potential solutions, aiming at easy to use and integrate tools. Further research areas are explained, and stated.

Ces travaux portent sur la conception multidisciplinaire de systèmes intégrés. Ces systèmes sont soumis à un nombre d’exigences toujours croissant, entraînant des besoins en termes d’intégration fonctionnelle et spatiale. Ces différents types d’intégration relative au produit sont également la source d’une complexité organisationnelle, provenant à la fois de la multitude d’acteurs réalisant différentes activités d’ingénierie, mais également de la diversité des domaines impliqués, désignée dans ce manuscrit par « intégration multidisciplinaire ». Pour favoriser cette intégration multidisciplinaire, les phases de « conception préliminaire » et de « conception détaillée » ont été identifiées comme déterminantes, notamment car elles se caractérisent par la collaboration de nombreux experts, manipulant un grand nombre de données techniques de définition. Les systèmes conçus lors de conceptions multidisciplinaires restent faiblement intégrés. Cela est en partie dû au cloisonnement entre les disciplines et à un mode d’organisation projet basé sur une planification prédominante, caractérisé notamment par une diffusion de l’information principalement descendante (top-down). Afin d’assurer une meilleure collaboration entre ces différentes disciplines, de permettre des prises de décision éclairées par des indicateurs opérationnels et de pouvoir analyser et mieux comprendre les phénomènes d’intégration des expertises, l’introduction d’une méthode inspirée des principes fondateurs des méthodes agiles est proposée pour la conception collaborative de systèmes intégrés.La contribution de ces travaux s’appuie sur trois concepts complémentaires. Le premier, intitulé Collaborative Actions Framework correspond à un cadre de collaboration opérationnelle autour d’actions. Un des objectifs de ce framework est de faciliter la collaboration des acteurs des projets de conception, quelle que soit leur origine disciplinaire, mais également d’assurer une traçabilité entre les prises de décision et les corrections/modifications apportées sur les données techniques. Cette traçabilité est rendue possible grâce aux liens existants avec le second concept intitulé Workspace. Apportant un nouvel éclairage sur les possibilités offertes par la collaboration autour de ces espaces de collaboration, ce concept offre un certain nombre de possibilités,notamment la mise en commun continue des travaux, l’intégration multidisciplinaire et la validation des modifications. Les échanges de données techniques entre les workspaces, ou le travail simultané sur les mêmes données techniques, s’appuient quant à eux sur la possibilité de pouvoir gérer de façon parallèle différentes versions d’une même donnée technique. Ces possibilités sont proposées par le troisième concept, intitulé branch & merge, qui permet également à différents acteurs de travailler simultanément sur les mêmes données. Enfin, ces trois concepts sont ensuite illustrés par l’intermédiaire d’un démonstrateur composé d’un scénario et d’un prototype informatique. Un produit mécatronique, combinaison synergique et systémique de la mécanique, de l'électronique et de l'informatique temps réel, est utilisé afin d’illustrer les possibilités offertes par nos travaux en termes d'intégration multidisciplinaire lors de la conception collaborative. / This work focuses on the multidisciplinary and collaborative design of integrated systems. These systems are subject to an ever increasing number of requirements, leading to the need for more comprehensive functional and spatial integration. These different types of product integration are also at the origin of organizational complexity. This complexity arises not only from the great number of actors performing various engineering activities but also from the diversity of disciplines involved (designated in this manuscript as “multidisciplinary integration”). To encourage this multidisciplinary integration, “preliminary design” and “detailed design” have been identified as the most significant steps, especially since they are characterized by the collaboration of multiple experts handling a large number of product definition’ technical data. Systems that have been designed thanks to multidisciplinary approaches are generally poorly integrated. This is partially due to the compartmentalization of disciplines, as well as to the “project-planned” method, where project planning is predominant and information is mainly spread out “top-down”. To ensure better cooperation between the various disciplines, to enable decision making based on operational indicators and to analyze and understand the multidisciplinary integration processes, a method inspired by the founding principles of agile methods (the agile manifesto) is proposed for the collaborative design of integrated systems. This work is based on three complementary concepts. The first is, the Collaborative Actions Framework, an operational framework for collaboration around actions. One objective of this framework is to improve the collaboration among designers, whatever their disciplinary origin. It also ensures traceability between decision making and corrections/changes made to technical data. This traceability is made possible by the useof the second concept, called Workspace. Even if this term is already well known, we propose a new definition/usage to transform it into collaboration spaces. This concept offers great possibilities, including the continuous delivering/sharing of experts’ contributions, multidisciplinary integration and change validation. The exchange of technical data between workspaces, or simultaneous work on the same data, relies on the ability to manage several parallel versions of the same item into a single datamanagement system. These opportunities are offered by the third concept, called Branch & Merge. Finally, these three concepts are illustrated through a scenario and a computer prototype. A mechatronic product, “the synergistic combination of mechanical and electrical engineering, computer science, and information technology” (Harashima et al., 1996), is used to illustrate the opportunities offered by our work in terms of multidisciplinary integration during collaborative design.

In the present, there are several programmes used for testing in this company. This may lead to a certain mutual inconsistency of the data within the system, as well as to the decrease of orientation and efficiency among the employees, that are in charge of the quality of the developed applications. There is approximately 200 employees in the IT department who focus on the development of the software. The biggest percentage has, though, the position of the tester. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the situation and the testing process in the selected bank company. Simultaneously, we would like to reach certain possibilities to unify the process of testing.