Software projects are known for their failure rate, where many are being delivered late, over budget or being canceled while in development. The reason to it is changing requirements and intangibility of the software. Being so abstract it is difficult to imaging all the aspects of the software at the requirements stage. Also technology is playing a major role since processing power, storage space, and data transfer speeds are improving from year to year. Agile methodologies are addressing projects with unclear requirements making process of implementing new specifications along the project much easier and less costly. However the success rate of the software projects did not improve much since the introduction of Agile methodologies. This thesis is looking at what type of projects fit different methodologies and what are factors which practitioners should take into account when selecting methodology for a particular project, The thesis opens up with introduction which sets the research question and provides a brief background to the research topic. In subsequent chapter literature review is conducted to find out what does literature and other researchers have said on the same topic. Third chapter discusses underlying research philosophy and discusses the data collection tools. Next chapter discusses the findings of the research. Interviews has been conducted with project management professionals from Sweden, US, UK and Canada. It was identified through the analysis of patters that Agile methodologies are not well suited for projects involving databases, embedded development and computationally complex projects. Through the analysis of the questionnaire several project characteristics were identified which suit Agile methodologies better than traditional ones: unclear requirements, high risk of failure etc… In the last chapter the thesis concludes the findings and its theoretical and practical implications.

Ever since the early 90¡¦s the global software market and knowledge accumulation have been growing at a rapid speed. Knowledge has become a critical asset for professional software service industry and therefore, the demands for knowledge management in this industry have been increased dramatically. This study presents a novel approach for knowledge management in structured systems analysis and design area for a professional software service firm. A case study and a prototype system were used to illustrate the feasibility and usability of the proposed method. These results provide a practical base and better understanding for the professional software firms when they implement a knowledge management system.

Although the functional enhancement and price decrease of computer hardware have rapidly increased the popularity of computers, quality software is the key to determine the value of information systems. Unfortunately, software development is a highly uncertain business. Many projects fail or escalate. Since software development is a labor and knowledge intensive taks, proper management of team composition is a critical research issue. The purpose of his research is to explore the relationship between knowledge diversity of software team and project performance. Research on team composition and performance is not new. However, few have studied the relationship on software development team. In this research, a research framework based on conflict theory is developed and an empirical study was conducted on Taiwanese firms to examine the extended model. Major funding include (1) knowledge diversity has significant positive effects on task conflict, and the task conflict has significant positive effects on team learning, (2) value diversity has positive effects on relationship conflict, and the relationship conflict has positive effect on the quality of interaction. These findings are useful in helping decision makers to manage software project teams by selecting the right team members.

Information Technology (IT) is inextricably tied to financial services; the business can no longer view IT as simply a part of discretionary spending. More particular to the financial services industry, technology is a way to gain competitive advantage through innovation. Financial services companies discover ways to utilize technology in order to generate product and process innovation, for example, consider the innovation to use scanners and, more recently, smart phones to deposit checks from home or elsewhere instead of with an ATM or a teller at a brick and mortar bank. As the market becomes more competitive, financial services companies must rely even more on product and process innovation. A key enabler of this innovation is the ability to fully understand the current state of how business value is delivered through the use of IT. This understanding can in turn help financial services companies to plan more effectively both strategically and tactically as the environmental factors change constantly. As companies spend vast amounts of money on projects, it is imperative to understand how ideas flow through a life cycle and are ultimately realized by some process or product offering that in turn deliver some value to the business. The goal of IT for the business is often stated as an improvement in triumvirate: better, faster, cheaper. The difficulty with this goal is that these facets are often mutually exclusive. How then, can IT deliver? This thesis will examine how one financial services company may improve its software project delivery process by examining its historical and current operating state and then discussing some recommendations to achieve improvement. / text

The main goal of this work is to analyze existing popular software size estimation and project completeness schedule methods and models, find advantages and disadvantages, try to combine them for using together, searching for common properties. The combination of these methods and models will give a new model, which will be tested with experimental research.

This thesis is about software project scheduling and use of earned value method on software projects. As a result of the study, a solution for software project scheduling problems is proposed. A mathematical formulation, developed using integer programming method, is at the heart of the solution. Objective of the formulation is to minimize the development costs consisting of direct labor cost, indirect costs and probable penalty costs. The formulation takes the capability and compatibility variances among resources into account whereas contemporary approaches mostly focus on resource availability. Formulation is of type discrete time and takes the time span to be searched as input. Therefore a heuristic approach has been developed for providing time span input to the models developed using the formulation. The heuristic approach has been proven to be calculating a time span that does not hinder achieving the absolute optimum schedule and shortens the solution time of the integer programs. The heuristic approach and problem formulation have been incorporated into a computer program that generates integer programs and heuristic solutions. This thesis also describes a method for preparing an earned value plan, based on the scheduling solution defined. The method aims to help project managers in determining the status of their projects and deciding whether any corrective action is required or not. Besides the method, approaches for incorporating indirect costs and penalty costs, which are not explicitly discussed in literature, into final cost estimation have been described.

[Truncated abstract] The primary tool for software process control is the project plan, with divergence from the schedule usually being the first indication that there are difficulties. Thus the estimation of the schedule, particularly the effort parameter, is a central element of software engineering management. Regrettably, estimation methods are poorly used within the software industry and accuracy is lacking when compared with other engineering disciplines. There are many reasons for this. However, the need to predict project effort remains, particularly in situations of tendering for contracts. The broad objective of this research is the improvement of project control by means of better estimation. . . The error in the prediction of a project parameter is investigated as the result of the variation in two distinct (estimation and actual development) processes. Improvement depends upon the understanding, control and then reduction of that variation. A strategy for the systematic identification of the sources of greatest variation is developed - so that it may be reduced by appropriate software engineering practices. The key to the success of the approach is the statistical partitioning of the Mean Square Error (of the estimate) in order to identify the weakest area of project control. The concept is proven with a set of student projects, where the estimation error is significantly reduced. The conditions for its transfer to industry are discussed and a systematic reduction in error is demonstrated on five sets of commercial project data. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the linking of the approach to current estimation methods. It should also have implications for the statistical process control of other projects involving small sample sizes and multiple correlated parameters.

abstract: This thesis research attempts to observe, measure and visualize the communication patterns among developers of an open source community and analyze how this can be inferred in terms of progress of that open source project. Here I attempted to analyze the Ubuntu open source project's email data (9 subproject log archives over a period of five years) and focused on drawing more precise metrics from different perspectives of the communication data. Also, I attempted to overcome the scalability issue by using Apache Pig libraries, which run on a MapReduce framework based Hadoop Cluster. I described four metrics based on which I observed and analyzed the data and also presented the results which show the required patterns and anomalies to better understand and infer the communication. Also described the usage experience with Pig Latin (scripting language of Apache Pig Libraries) for this research and how they brought the feature of scalability, simplicity, and visibility in this data intensive research work. These approaches are useful in project monitoring, to augment human observation and reporting, in social network analysis, to track individual contributions. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2011

Software process improvement (SPI) is generally associated with large organizations. Large organizations have the possibilities to fund software process improvement programs as large scale activities. Often these improvement programs do not show progress until some time has elapsed. The Capability Maturity Model can take one year to implement and not until then can measures be made to see how much quality increased. Small organizations do not have the same funding opportunities but are still in need of software process improvement programs. Generally it is better to initiate a software process improvement program as early as possible, no matter what size of organization. Although the funding capabilities for small organizations are less compared to large organizations, the total required funding will still be smaller than in large organizations. The small organization will grow and overtime become a midsized or large organization, so by starting an improvement program at an early stage the funding overall should be minimized. This becomes more visible when the organization has grown large. This master thesis presents the idea of implementing a software process improvement program, or at least parts of it, by evaluating the software project. By evaluating a project the specific needs that are most critical are implemented in the next project. This process is iterated for each concluded project. The master thesis introduces the Iterating Evaluation Model based on an interview survey. This model is compared to an already existing model, the Experience Factory.

The main object of this thesis is a design of the project with the utilization of project management principles in the chosen company. Company SynopsIS Technologies, a.s. is developing and selling a software solution for advocacy and law offices. The starting point of the entire process of designing is the strategic analysis of the current state of the company, analysis of the external environment and business field of the company. The main object is a designed project of the change, which will be used for project management in order to successfully reach set goals and minimize the risks of the project. A designed solution is using the support of Microsoft Project Professional 2016 software.