Software process improvements are required to increase the productivity of software companies. Generally, it is the aim to increase the quality of the produced software and to keep budget and time. Quality models for software process improvements were developed in context of large organisations and multi-national companies. In this study I investigated how software process improvements are done in a small software company. Ethnography was used as research method. It was the aim of this study to build up an understanding of how software process improvements are done and enabled in a small organisation. Fieldnotes were taken and later analysed using template analysis. Ethnography as the chosen research strategy proved to be applicable and feasible in software engineering research. The qualitative research strategy resulted in a detailed description of how one software company did software process improvements from a bottom-up perspective. Despite the learning potential of "how real world contingencies and possibilities interact and shape software process improvement efforts", such descriptions are rare in software engineering literature. Based on the field experiences and the analysed fieldnotes, the following results were identified: In the studied small software organisation, software process improvement efforts were pushed by the initiative of single employees. The studied company did not have enough resources to implement a complete quality model. In addition, management was heavily involved in daily work and therefore had not enough time to initiate and lead software process improvement efforts. For small software companies in a similar situation, the following guidelines can be given: First, a bottom-up approach with delegating responsibility from management to selected employees is needed. Second, management must ensure to be available if decisions must be taken. Third, improvements must be visible and feedback must be provided contemporary to gain momentum in the whole improvement effort. In some cases it might be important to create awareness of possible improvements. Here, employees should create internal lobbies by involving and convincing other employees of the improvement's importance. A joined effort will help to create enough pressure for change, so that improvement efforts get started. / Please review the chosen subjects! I'm not sure, if I have done this correctly. My thesis touches all those parts, still it is not a complete sociological study. Besides email you can reach me by phone (Germany, mobile): +49 163 4016393

Computer science in general and software engineering in specific is changing very fast. Software engineers are constantly using more innovative and more efficient ways to develop new software than in the past. This continuous evolution of software development methodologies has a great impact on both the software developed and the environment that the developers work-in. Agile software development methodologies are used to overcome many issues in the software development processes. One of the issues which still exists and needs to be addressed is the preparation of proper documentation along with the software. The work presented in this dissertation focuses on software documentation. The work starts by a thorough literature review which focuses on different aspects of software documentation and different agile methodologies. The thesis focuses on finding out the challenges that the developers faces during their development process. Two major questions addressed in the thesis. First one is to find the motivation to document in agile envirionment, whih is based on the hypothesis that there do exist a motivation. The second question is that how should documentation be produced such that we could avoid maximum possible potential problems. These questions are addressed with the help of different perspectives of the stockholders (i.e. developers and users) and the existing methods for documentation. A questionnaire was developed based on the nine categories of documentation, like user documents and system documents etc.. It included different questions related to the types of documents created in software development processes, the software development stage at which the documents are created and the importance of the documents. Questions from this questionnaire are then posted on agile specific discussion forums. Where many experienced and fresh practitioners participated in the discussion. We had a detailed discussion on every component of documentation and problems were identified by the practitioners. The questionnaire was also sent to different companies practicing agile methodology. we received about 14 responses as it was detailed questionnaire with about 34 questions. The responses of the discussion forum and survey are then analyzed and conclusions were drawn. The conclusions include that all the participants consider software documentation very important to the success of a software development project. the question of motivation is answered from the literature and opinions we received from experienced practitioners. While seven factor are identified that affect your documentation, to help solve the question of how should documentation be done.

Care process monitoring is important in healthcare domains to provide precise and detailed analytics on patients, providers, and resources participating in a care process and their status. These analytics are used to keep track of whether the quality of care goals set by healthcare organizations are satisfied and ensure that legislative and organizational guidelines are followed. The complexity of care process monitoring can vary depending on whether the care process takes place in a hospital or out in the community, and it can vary depending on the complexity of the information technology infrastructure that is in place to support the care process. A Care Process Monitoring Application (CPMA) is a software application which collects and integrates data from various sources while a care process is being provided, in order to provide performance reporting of metrics that are used to measure how well the performance goals and guidelines for the care process are being met. In our research, we have studied how CPMAs are built in order to improve the quality of their engineering. The significant challenge in this context is how to engineer a CPMA so that the engineering process is repeatable, produces a CPMA of consistent high quality, and requires less time, less effort and less complexity. This thesis proposes an application framework for care process monitoring that collects and integrates events from event sources, maintains the individual and aggregate states of the care process and populates a metrics data mart to support performance reporting. Our contributions are the following: a state-based application meta-model of care process monitoring, a care process monitoring architectural pattern, and finally, a behavior driven development methodology for CPMAs based on our meta-model and architectural pattern. Our results are validated through three different case studies in which we collaborated with two different health care organizations to build and deploy CPMAs for two different care processes (one hospital-based, the other community-based) in collaboration with healthcare clinicians and researchers.

Care process monitoring is important in healthcare domains to provide precise and detailed analytics on patients, providers, and resources participating in a care process and their status. These analytics are used to keep track of whether the quality of care goals set by healthcare organizations are satisfied and ensure that legislative and organizational guidelines are followed. The complexity of care process monitoring can vary depending on whether the care process takes place in a hospital or out in the community, and it can vary depending on the complexity of the information technology infrastructure that is in place to support the care process. A Care Process Monitoring Application (CPMA) is a software application which collects and integrates data from various sources while a care process is being provided, in order to provide performance reporting of metrics that are used to measure how well the performance goals and guidelines for the care process are being met. In our research, we have studied how CPMAs are built in order to improve the quality of their engineering. The significant challenge in this context is how to engineer a CPMA so that the engineering process is repeatable, produces a CPMA of consistent high quality, and requires less time, less effort and less complexity. This thesis proposes an application framework for care process monitoring that collects and integrates events from event sources, maintains the individual and aggregate states of the care process and populates a metrics data mart to support performance reporting. Our contributions are the following: a state-based application meta-model of care process monitoring, a care process monitoring architectural pattern, and finally, a behavior driven development methodology for CPMAs based on our meta-model and architectural pattern. Our results are validated through three different case studies in which we collaborated with two different health care organizations to build and deploy CPMAs for two different care processes (one hospital-based, the other community-based) in collaboration with healthcare clinicians and researchers.