This thesis examines and evaluates whether it is possible to measure the quality of a software project and introduces a metric that will evaluate if the quality of every test performed when developing software can be measured. This subject is examined because it can be hard to conclude how well a project and all its parts performed, both during implementation and after it is done. To facilitate this need, this thesis provides a possible solution.   To try and answer these questions and meet the needs of this tool a prototype has been developed. The prototype is automated and runs through all the software development tests selected for this project. It sums up the test results and later translates them with the help of a metric to tell its quality grade. The metric is calculated with the help of an arbitrary formula developed for this thesis. Once the metric is concluded the development team working with the project will have an overview of how well each test area is performing and how well the project's end result was. With the help of this metric it is also easier to see if the quality achieved meets the company’s standards and the customer’s wishes. The prototype aims to be sustainable because the solution should last for a long term and also because sustainability means a smoother and more efficient way for developers and other people involved to work with the prototype since not much extra work will be required when updates need to be implemented or other necessary implementations.   The prototype is applied on a second project, which is larger and more advanced than the project created for this thesis, to get a better and accurate understanding if the implementation is correct and if the metric can be used as a value to describe a project. The metric results are compared and evaluated. The results of this thesis conclude a proof-of-concept and can be seen as a first step in a longer evaluation and process in determining the quality of tests. The results conclusion is that more parameters and more weighing of each tests importance are needed in order to achieve a reliable metric result.   This tool is meant to ease and help developers to quickly come to a conclusion about how good the work is. It could also be beneficial for a company with focus on web development and IT-solutions though it will be easier to follow and set a standard for the services they provide.

Researchers have speculated that global software teams have activity patterns that are dictated by work-place schedules or a client's need. Similar patterns have been suggested for individuals enrolled in distant learning projects that require students to post feedback in response to questions or assignments. Researchers tend to accept the notion that students' temporal patterns adjust to academic or social calendars and are a result of choices made within these constraints. Although there is some evidence that culture do have an impact on communication activity behavior, there is not a clear how each of these factors may relate to work done in online groups. This particular study represents a new approach to studying student-group communication activities and also pursues an alternative approach by using activity data from students participating in a global software development project to generate a variety of complex measures that capture patterns about when students work. Students work habits are also often determined by where they live and what they are working on. Moreover, students tend to work on group projects in cycles, which correspond to a start, middle, and end time period. Knowledge obtained from this study should provide insight into current empirical research on global software development by defining the different time variables that can also be used to compare temporal patterns found in real-world teams. It should also inform studies about student team projects by helping instructors schedule group activities.

Usability is a concept that describes the extent to which users can achieve specific goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specific context. Despite that many studies have been written about usability and usability tests, surprisingly few have explored how organizations work with usability knowledge. Since previous studies have indicated that usability issues are commonly encountered the purpose of this study is to increase usability knowledge among software developers within organizations by analyzing which obstacles are in the way of spreading usability knowledge and how it is possible to counteract these. Six software developers in organizations have been interviewed about their experience with usability knowledge for this study. The result of the study shows that the respondents’ organizations prioritized usability knowledge lower than technical knowledge for dissemination of knowledge, which meant that software developers had to take almost all initiatives to learn about usability themselves. When opportunities did present themselves for dissemination of usability knowledge the respondents were not made aware of it by their superiors or upper management. Usability knowledge also becomes outdated quickly which leads to failures in many attempts to create common knowledge databases within this area of expertise. The software developers interviewed indicated that some of the most informative moments for usability knowledge were direct observation of end users. Despite this they were very rarely given the opportunity to personally participate in these activities because of how difficult it is to convince both supervisors and end users that it is a rewarding activity for all involved parties. The obstacles to spreading usability knowledge that were identified were categorized in accordance with the SECI-model, namely Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization. The study contributes with knowledge that the SECI-model can successfully be utilized to identify deficiencies and lost potential among knowledge creating moments for usability. The study also presents an explanation to that dissemination of usability knowledge is prioritized lower than technical knowledge in the form of selective functional stupidity, an  unwillingness to critically reflect about difficult questions in order to maintain productivity and suppress insecurity within a specific area. Furthermore the study presents explanations to why usability knowledge is difficult to teach based on the theory of tacit and explicit knowledge. Since usability knowledge is contextually dependent as well as hard to formulate and generalize it is difficult to translate it from tacit to explicit, which makes many knowledge creating moments within the subject fail. Finally a number of recommendations are presented for counteracting the identified obstacles to spreading usability knowledge and thereby achieve the purpose of increasing usability knowledge among software developers within organizations. / Användbarhet är ett begrepp som beskriver hur ändamålsenligt, effektivt och tillfredsställande någonting är att använda. Trots att många studier har utforskat användbarhet och användbarhetstester är förvånansvärt lite skrivet om hur organisationer arbetar med användbarhetskunskap. Eftersom tidigare studier indikerat att användbarhetsproblem är vanligt förekommande är syftet med denna studie att öka användbarhetskunskap bland mjukvaruutvecklare inom organisationer genom att analysera vilka hinder som finns mot att sprida användbarhetskunskap och hur man kan arbeta för att motverka dessa. Sex mjukvaruutvecklare inom organisationer har intervjuats för denna studie om deras erfarenheter av användbarhetskunskap. Studiens resultat visar att respondenternas organisationer prioriterade användbarhetskunskap lägre än tekniska kunskapsområden för kunskapsspridning, vilket gjorde att mjukvaruutvecklare själva fick ta nästan alla initiativ för att lära sig om användbarhet. När det väl fanns möjlighet för kunskapsspridning inom användbarhet fick respondenterna inte vetskap om detta från chefer eller ledning. Användbarhetskunskap blir dessutom lätt utdaterad vilket gör att många försök inom organisationer till att skapa gemensamma kunskapsdatabaser för området misslyckas.  Mjukvaruutvecklarna som intervjuades indikerade att några av de mest lärorika tillfällena för användbarhetskunskap var direkta slutanvändarobservationer. Trots detta gavs det väldigt sällan möjlighet för dem att personligen delta i dessa aktiviteter på grund av hur svårt det är att motivera både slutanvändare och chefer att det är en givande aktivitet för alla parter. De hinder som identifierades mot att sprida användbarhetskunskap kategoriserades enligt SECI-modellen, dvs.  Socialisering, Externalisering, Kombinering och Internalisering. Studien bidrar med kunskap om att SECI-modellen framgångsrikt kan användas för att identifiera brister och förlorad potential bland kunskapsskapande moment för användbarhet. Studien  presenterar också en förklaring till att kunskapsspridning inom användbarhet prioriteras lägre än teknisk kunskap i form av funktionell dumhet, en ovilja att kritiskt reflektera över svåra frågor för att hålla produktivitet uppe och osäkerhet nere inom ett specifikt område. Vidare presenterar studien också förklaringar till varför användbarhetskunskap är svårt att lära ut utifrån teorin om tyst och explicit kunskap. Eftersom användbarhetskunskap är kontextuellt beroende, svårformulerad och svårgeneraliserad är det svårt att översätta den från tyst till explicit, vilket gör att många kunskapsskapande moment inom ämnet misslyckas. Slutligen presenteras ett antal rekommendationer för hur man kan motverka de hinder som identifierats mot att sprida användbarhetskunskap och på så vis uppnå syftet att öka användbarhetskunskap bland mjukvaruutvecklare inom organisationer.

This thesis answers how to create an effective quality assurance method within software development, especially games development. The work has mainly consisted of interviews with employees and others within the same business as well as studies of literature. The thesis also describes how the new quality management method got management acceptance, how it was implemented, what happened and recommendations. The work was conducted in 2007 and the result in this report is still, eight years later, used by the company. / Denna rapport berättar hur man skapar en effektiv kvalitetssäkringsmetod inom mjukvaruutveckling, särskilt spelutveckling. Arbetet har i huvudsak bestått av intervjuer med företagets anställda såväl som andra inom samma bransch samt litteraturstudier. Rapporten beskriver även hur den nya kvalitetssäkringsmetoden förankrades i organisationen, hur den implementerades, vad som hände sen samt rekommendationer. Arbetet utfördes 2007 och såsom framgår i denna rapport används resultatet, åtta år senare, fortfarande av företaget.

Today, the number of software projects having large number of developers distributed all over the world is increasing rapidly. This rapid growth in distributed software development, increases the need for new tools and environments to facilitate the developers’ communication, collaboration and cooperation. Distributed revision control systems, such as Git or Bazaar, are examples oftools that have evolved to improve the quality of development in such projects. In addition, building and testing large scale cross platform software is especially hard for individual developers in an open source development community, dueto their lack of powerful and diverse computing resources.Computational grids are networks of computing resources that are geographically distributed and can be used to run complex tasks very efficiently by exploiting parallelism. However these systems are often configured for cloud computing and use a centralized structure which reduces their scalability and fault tolerance. Pure peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, on the other hand are networks without a central structure. P2P systems are highly scalable, flexible, dynamically adaptable and fault tolerant. Introducing P2P and grid computing together tothe software development process can significantly increase the access to more computing resource by individual developers distributed all over the world. In this master thesis we evaluated the possibilities of integrating these technologies with software development and the associated test cycle in order to achieve better software quality in community driven software development. The main focus of this project was on the mechanisms of data transfer, management, and dependency among peers as well as investigating the performance/overhead ratio of these technologies. For our evaluation we used the MoSync Software Development Kit (SDK), a cross platform mobile software solution, as a case study and developed and evaluated a prototype for the distributed development of this system. Our measurements show that using our prototype the time required for building MoSync SDK’s is approximately six times shorter than using a single process. We have also proposed a method for near optimum task distribution over peer to peer grids that are used for build and test. / Idag är antalet programvaruprojekt med stort antal utvecklare distribueras överh ela världen ökar snabbt. Denna snabba tillväxt i distribuerad mjukvaruutveckling, ökar behovet av nya verktyg och miljöer för att underlätta utvecklarnas kommunikation, samarbete och samarbete. Distribuerat versionshanteringssystem,såsom Git och Bazaar, är exempel påverktyg som har utvecklats för att för bättra kvaliteten påutvecklingen i sådana projekt. Dessutom, bygga ochtesta storskalig programvara plattformsoberoende är särskilt svrt för enskilda utvecklare i en öppen källkod utvecklingsgemenskap, pågrund av deras brist påkraftfulla och mångsidiga datorresurser. Datorgridd är nätverk av IT-resurser som är geografiskt f¨ordelade och kan användas för att köra komplexa uppgifter mycket effektivt genom att utnyttja parallellitet. Men dessa system är ofta konfigurerade för molndator och användaen centraliserad struktur vilket minskar deras skalbarhet och feltolerans. En ren icke-hierarkiskt (P2P-n¨atverk) system, åandra sidan är nätverk utan en central struktur. P2P-systemen är skalbara, flexibla, dynamiskt anpassningsbar och feltolerant. Introduktion P2P och datorgridd tillsammans med mjukvaruutveckling processen kan avsevärt öka tillgången till merdatorkraft resurs genom enskilda utvecklare distribueras över hela världen. I detta examensarbete har vi utvärderat möjligheterna att integrera dessa tekniker med utveckling av programvara och tillhörande testcykel för att uppnåbättre programvara kvalitet i samhället drivs mjukvaruutveckling. Tyngdpunkten i detta projekt var på mekanismerna för överföring av data, hantering,och beroendet bland kamrater samt undersöka prestanda / overhead förhllandet mellan dessa tekniker. För vr utvärdering använde vi MoSync SoftwareDevelopment Kit (SDK), en plattformsoberoende mobil programvara lösning,som en fallstudie och utvecklat och utvärderat en prototyp f¨or distribueradutveckling av detta system. Våra mätningar visar att med hjälp av vår prototypden tid som krävs f¨or att bygga MoSync SDK är cirka sex gånger kortare änmed en enda process. Vi har också föreslagit en metod för nära optimal uppgiftf¨ordelning ¨over peer to peer nät som används f¨or att bygga och testa.

Data warehousing is a new and emerging field. Projects tend to be complex and time consuming. Because of this complexity, teams tend to commit to more than they can deliver. This causes delayed delivery. Applying Agile development styles to data warehousing is one of the alternative methodologies that are being investigated to help teams to accelerate the delivery of business value. Scrum is one of the frameworks that falls within the Agile stream. Scrum focuses on project management and makes use of iterative and incremental development. It tries to deliver the smallest piece of business value the fastest. The paper evaluates the implementation of Scrum in a data warehouse team of a financial investment company. The researcher did an action research study on the team to see if Scrum can be used as a viable alternative framework to bring agility to Data Warehouse development. She examined the changes that the team experienced during and after the implementation of Scrum, focusing on team structure and roles within the teams. The researcher defined a framework to evaluate how well the team implemented Scrum. The researcher also evaluated the quality of work delivered, and the predictability and productivity of the team as metrics to see if Scrum made a difference within the team. The research paper examined why the implementation failed and what issues Scrum highlighted within the team as well as within the way that the company implemented it. / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Informatics / unrestricted

User experience design is the process of improving the accessibility and use of a product during user’s interaction with it. This study investigates the issues that occur in the coordination of UX design and software development. Furthermore, it examines diverse types of conflicts between UX designers, front-end and back-end developers, factors contributing to these conflicts and their influence on the software development process. The method used in this study is a survey conducted in an online form with a target group of practitioners. The data show that task conflicts are the most common type of conflicts in teams, that gender of a person can influence its awareness of the project status and that age and geographical location do not affect the occurrence of the identified conflicts.

Virtual teams in industry are increasingly being used to develop software, create products, and accomplish tasks. However, analyzing those collaborations under same-time/different-place conditions is well-known to be difficult. In order to overcome some of these challenges, this research was concerned with the study of collaboration-based, content-based and temporal measures and their ability to predict cohesion within global software development projects. Messages were collected from three software development projects that involved students from two different countries. The similarities and quantities of these interactions were computed and analyzed at individual and group levels. Results of interaction-based metrics showed that the collaboration variables most related to Task Cohesion were Linguistic Style Matching and Information Exchange. The study also found that Information Exchange rate and Reply rate have a significant and positive correlation to Task Cohesion, a factor used to describe participants' engagement in the global software development process. This relation was also found at the Group level. All these results suggest that metrics based on rate can be very useful for predicting cohesion in virtual groups. Similarly, content features based on communication categories were used to improve the identification of Task Cohesion levels. This model showed mixed results, since only Work similarity and Social rate were found to be correlated with Task Cohesion. This result can be explained by how a group's cohesiveness is often associated with fairness and trust, and that these two factors are often achieved by increased social and work communications. Also, at a group-level, all models were found correlated to Task Cohesion, specifically, Similarity+Rate, which suggests that models that include social and work communication categories are also good predictors of team cohesiveness. Finally, temporal interaction similarity measures were calculated to assess their prediction capabilities in a global setting. Results showed a significant negative correlation between the Pacing Rate and Task Cohesion, which suggests that frequent communications increases the cohesion between team members. The study also found a positive correlation between Coherence Similarity and Task Cohesion, which indicates the importance of establishing a rhythm within a team. In addition, the temporal models at individual and group-levels were found to be good predictors of Task Cohesion, which indicates the existence of a strong effect of frequent and rhythmic communications on cohesion related to the task. The contributions in this dissertation are three fold. 1) Novel use of Temporal measures to describe a team's rhythmic interactions, 2) Development of new, quantifiable factors for analyzing different characteristics of a team's communications, 3) Identification of interesting factors for predicting Task Cohesion levels among global teams.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic forced many companies to transition to remote work, which has created a social distance among team members that may affect team performance. Although previous studies have examined the relationship of team cohesion and team performance, few have investigated the question whether remote work affects team performance. Specifically, this study examines the correlation between team cohesion and team performance by comparing the same teams working locally versus remotely. Objectives: The objective is to investigate the correlation between team cohesion and team performance based on whether teams work locally or remotely. Method: The study was quantitative, using regression analysis. Data was gathered at a software company in Sweden. Team cohesion was evaluated based on verbal mimicry via the Language Style Matching (LSM) algorithm, applied on chat messages. Team performance was evaluated based on git contributions and tickets done. Team efficiency was analyzed via Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Team efficiencies were analyzed in the context of both time periods, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and both work settings. Association between team efficiency and team cohesion was investigated based on the work setting. Tools such as Excel, R, Python, LIWC, and MS Forms were used. Analysis results: When efficiency is correlated with LSM score (cohesion) for teams working remotely, there is a significantly strong positive correlation, suggesting cohesion plays an important role on team efficiency when working remotely. This observation is in line with previous research on cohesion influence on performance of local teams. The change of work setting did not affect the cohesion level of teams. Conclusions: Teams working remotely can be as effective as teams working locally. Teams working remotely can be as cohesive as teams working locally. Cohesion is especially relevant for team performance when teams work remotely. Recommendations for future research: One suggestion is to add Social Network Analysis (SNA) in the study to enhance internal validity of team cohesion measurement. Additional research could be done by conducting a qualitative study to compare against the perceived cohesion and performance.

Mobile phones can be used to assess patients health by collecting valuable informationthrough the sensors, GPS and accelerometers and then uploading them to a centraldatabase to allow for clinicians to remotely monitor the decline, improvement or over-all health status of a patient [1] [2].Many mHealth applications use mobile phones built-in GPS, accelerometer and othersensors which allows for a large selection of work to compare the implemented exercisecapacity test to [1].The exercise capacity tests developed for this thesis is to be used in Mobistudy. Mobis-tudy is an open mobile-health platform for clinical research. The platform has an emphasison regulatory compliance, patient consent and transparency [3].The thesis resulted in the creation of two artifacts which were able to successfullycollect data from the user to transfer to the clinicians using the application. During theanalysis it was found that the SMWT algorithm developed by Salvi et al [4] worked wellunder non optimal conditions. The Queens College Step Tests result were in general poor,however more testing with more different phones is required to provide a clear answer.