Many organizations are moving towards Global Software Engineering and Global Development is becoming a major trend. Global Software Engineering comes with its own set of challenges that may affect projects in a negative way. However, it is still becoming increasingly popular among organizations because of its lure of cheap labour, portrayal of a global presence and a diverse talent/labour pool of resources that the organizations get to select from. The need for evaluating the processes of these global organizations has also grown and a number of Software Process frameworks are being designed and restructured to help cover the gap of evaluating these processes in a global environment. This thesis aims to examine one popular Software Process framework i.e. the ISO 9001:2000 TickIT. The authors provide informed recommendations of how and where the TickIT guide can incorporate various aspects of Global Software Engineering in its guidelines. The empirical validation of this research consisted of both interviews and surveys. The interviews were conducted with TickIT auditors working in the fields of Global Software Engineering and Software Process Improvement. These interviews provided insight into the minds of the people already working in the global software domain. The survey was in the form of an online questionnaire that was sent out to TickIT auditors from the United Kingdom and Sweden. Their replies were analyzed and the final informed recommendations for the TickIT guidelines were provided based on both the interview replies and the questionnaire analysis. / Many organizations are moving towards Global Software Engineering and Global Development is becoming a major trend. Global Software Engineering comes with its own set of challenges that may affect projects in a negative way. However, it is still becoming increasingly popular among organizations because of its lure of cheap labour, portrayal of a global presence and a diverse talent/labour pool of resources that the organizations get to select from. The need for evaluating the processes of these global organizations has also grown and a number of Software Process frameworks are being designed and restructured to help cover the gap of evaluating these processes in a global environment. This thesis aims to examine one popular Software Process framework i.e. the ISO 9001:2000 TickIT. The authors provide informed recommendations of how and where the TickIT guide can incorporate various aspects of Global Software Engineering in its guidelines. The empirical validation of this research consisted of both interviews and surveys. The interviews were conducted with TickIT auditors working in the fields of Global Software Engineering and Software Process Improvement. These interviews provided insight into the minds of the people already working in the global software domain. The survey was in the form of an online questionnaire that was sent out to TickIT auditors from the United Kingdom and Sweden. Their replies were analyzed and the final informed recommendations for the TickIT guidelines were provided based on both the interview replies and the questionnaire analysis. / Mobile: +46-73-5590649, +46-76-2509246

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.