Context. Industry is moving from co-located form of development to a distributed development in order to achieve different benefits such as cost reduction, access to skillful labor and around the clock working etc. This transfer requires industry to face different challenges such as communication, coordination and monitoring problems. Risk of project failure can be increased, if industry does not address these problems. This thesis is about providing the solutions of these problems in term of effective roles and responsibilities that may have positive impact on GSD team. Objectives. In this study we have developed framework for suggesting roles and responsibilities for GSD team. This framework consists of problems and casual dependencies between them which are related to team’s ineffectiveness, then suggestions in terms of roles and responsibilities have been presented in order to have an effective team in GSD. This framework, further, has been validated in industry through a survey that determines which are the effective roles and responsibilities in GSD. Methods. We have two research methods in this study 1) systematic literature review and 2) survey. Complete protocol for planning, conducting and reporting the review as well as survey has been described in their respective sections in this thesis. A systematic review is used to develop the framework whereas survey is used for framework validation. We have done static validation of framework. Results. Through SLR, we have identified 30 problems, 33 chains of problems. We have identified 4 different roles and 40 different responsibilities to address these chains of problems. During the validation of the framework, we have validated the links between suggested roles and responsibilities and chains of problems. Addition to this, through survey, we have identified 20 suggestions that represents strong positive impact on chains of problems in GSD in relation to team’s effectiveness. Conclusions. We conclude that implementation of effective roles and responsibilities in GSD team to avoid different problems require considerable attention from researchers and practitioners which can guarantee team’s effectiveness. Implementation of proper roles and responsibilities has been mentioned as one of the successful strategies for increasing team’s effectiveness in the literature, but which particular roles and responsibilities should be implemented still need to be addressed. We also conclude that there must be basic responsibilities associated with any particular role. Moreover, we conclude that there is a need for further development and empirical validation of different frameworks for suggesting roles and responsibilities in full scale industry trials.

Global Software Development (GSD) is an emerging trend in today's software world in which teams are geographically dispersed, either in close proximity or globally. GSD provides certain advantages to development companies like low development cost, access to cheap and skilled labour etc. This type of development is noted as a more risky and challenging as compared to projects developed with teams under same roof. Inherently the nature of GSD projects are cooperative in which many software developers work on a common project, share information and coordinate activities. Coordination is a fundamental part of software development. GSD comprises different types of development systems i.e. insourcing, outsourcing, nearshoring, or farshoring, whatever the types of development systems selected by a company there exist the challenges to coordination. Therefore the knowledge of potential challenges, associated threats to coordination and practices to mitigate them plays a vital role for running a successful global project.

Business success in software industry is about deploying a product to the right market, with the right features, in the right time with a good quality. Many development projects exceed the budget, is not completed within schedule or do not reach business objectives. One key role managing the business of the product is the software product manager. The software product manager role is though seldom clearly described, competence needed is not always clear and education to become a product manager is today only offered by separate courses provided by some few private initiatives. This thesis uses a qualitative descriptive approach, the purpose with this thesis is to produce further knowledge around the software product manager role. The clarification and structure of the software product manager role is limited in academia; therefore, this research will be combined with an exploratory approach to be able to verify the empirical findings. The thesis also includes observations and data collection from actual job applications to further define the requested competences of a software product manager. This thesis has found that domain competence is the top most important competence for a software product manager. To be able to make success in the role communication skills and analytic skills are most important. The right soft skills are as important as the educated competences. The thesis conclude that the product manager role is wide and it is important to be surrounded with colleagues that support the role were there are lacking of competence in technology, business or market expertise. A successful product manager build network among people, cross-functional teams, around the product and establish an effective way to communicate with those groups. Findings suggest that software companies define the responsibilities and expectations of the product manager role. As important is to support the product manager with the input data needed to be able to perform the product manager activities. By defining the responsibilities and securing the input data needed, the product manager will have a higher probability to produce a result with an impact.

The increasing complexity in the development of a configurable real-time system has emerged new principles of software techniques, such as aspect-oriented software development and component-based software development. These techniques allow encapsulation of the system's crosscutting concerns and increase the modularity of the software. The properties of a component that influences the systems performance or semantics are specified separately in entities called aspects, while basic functionality of the property still remains in the component. When building a real-time system, different sets of configurations of aspects and components can be combined, resulting in different configurations of the system. The temporal behavior of the system changes and a way to ensure the predictability of the system is needed. This thesis presents a tool for aspect-level worst-case execution time analysis, which gives a priori information about the temporal behavior of the system, before the process of composing aspects with components.

Rising complexity in the development of real-time systems has made it crucial to have reusable components and a more flexible way of configuring these components into a coherent system. Aspect-oriented system development (AOSD) is a technique that allows one to put a system’s crosscutting concerns into"modules"that are called aspects. Applying AOSD in real-time and embedded system development one can expect reductions in the complexity of the system design and development. A problem with AOSD in its current form is that it does not support predictability in the time domain. Hence, in order to use AOSD in real-time system development, we need to provide ways of analyzing temporal behavior of aspects, components and resulting system (made from weaving aspects and components). Aspect analyzer is a tool that computes the worst-case execution time (WCET) for a set of components and aspects, thus, enabling support for predictability in the time domain of aspect-oriented real-time software. A limitation of the aspect analyzer, until now, were that no verification had been made whether the aspect analyzer would produce WCET values that were close to the measured or computed (with another WCET analysis technique) WCET of an aspect-oriented real-time system. Therefore, in this thesis we perform a verification of the correctness of the aspect analyzer using a number of different methods for WCET analysis. These investigations of the correctness of the output from the aspect analyzer gave confidence to the automated WCET analysis. In addition, performing this verification led to the identification of the steps necessary to compute the WCETs of a piece of program, when using a third party tool, which gives the ability to write accurate input files for the aspect analyzer.

During the last years the need for real-time database services has increased due to the growing number of data-intensive applications needing to enforce real-time constraints. The COMponent-based Embedded real-Time database (COMET) is a real-time database developed to meet these demands. COMET is developed using the AspeCtual COmponent-based Real-time system Development (ACCORD) design method, and consists of a number of components and aspects, which can be composed into a number of different configurations depending on system demands, e.g., Quality of Service (QoS) management can be used in unpredictable environments. In embedded systems with requirementson high up-time it may not be possible to temporarily shut down the system for reconfiguration. Instead it is desirable to enable dynamic reconfiguration of the system, exchanging components during run-time. This in turn sets demands on the feedback control of the system to adjust to these new conditions, since a new time variant system has been created. This thesis project implements improvements in COMET to create a more stable database suitable for further development. A mechanism for dynamic reconfiguration of COMET is implemented, thus, enabling components and aspects to be swapped during run-time. Adaptive feedback control algorithms are also implemented in order to better adjust to workload variations and database reconfiguration.

Personal Software Process (PSP) Scriber is a Web-based software engineering tool designed to implement an automatic system for performing PSP. The basis of this strategy is a set of tools to facilitate collection and analysis of development data. By analyzing the collected data, the developer can make informed, accurate decisions about their individual development effort.

This project created a program that takes predicate calculus formulas and creates a visual Semantic Tableaux truth tree, thereby proving or disproving a conclusion. Formal methods used in developing and verifying software and hardware are mathematically based techniques for describing and reasoning about system properties. Such formal methods provide frameworks within which people specify, develop, and verify systems in a systematic, rather than ad hoc, manner. Formal methods include the more specific activities of program specification, program verification and hardware verification.

The purpose of this thesis is to provide the California State University, San Bernardino, Department of Computer Science with an analysis and recommended solution to improving the software development process.

Text in English / Scrum is the most adopted and under-researched Agile methodology. The research conducted on Scrum adoption is mainly qualitative. Therefore, there was a need for a quantitative study to investigate Scrum adoption challenges. The general objective of this study was to investigate the factors that have a significant relationship with Scrum adoption as perceived by Scrum practitioners working within South African organisations. To achieve this objective a narrative review to synthesise the existing challenges was conducted, followed by the use of these challenges in the development of a conceptual framework. After that, a survey questionnaire was used to test and evaluate the developed framework. The research findings indicate that relative advantage, complexity, and sprint management are factors that have a significant linear relationship with Scrum adoption. The findings are generalisable to the population, and the author recommends that organisations review the findings during their adoption phase of Scrum. / Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) / University of South Africa (UNISA) / School of Computing / M.Sc. (Computing)