Masters of Science / In a world where technology is advancing at a very rapid pace, global competition has significantly increased, and this is putting pressure on software companies to produce quality software. It has therefore become critically important to manage well the implementation of software engineering projects by employing effective methods that ensure the best product is produced. The most popular software project implementation methodologies are the Traditional methods and Agile methods. This research explored these two methodologies by comparing the strength and weakness of both approaches. The research was conducted using a constructionist epistemology with a critical inquiry using the grounded theory methodology, applying both quantitative and qualitative methods to the case studies. Findings were collected through participant observation using a designed questionnaire targeting a selected sample of the study population. This sample of the population consisted of Ecommerce organizations in the Western Cape province of South Africa to establish which of the Traditional or Agile methods would best lead to the successful implementation of Ecommerce software engineering projects. The research results showed that the Agile methodology was the preferred and recommended approach. Very few participants of the research supported the Traditional approach to still be considered and used for projects with well-known end goals. An Ecommerce website prototype for a local Cape Town business was constructed as following the Agile approach to measure and validate the findings of the research. The prototype was built successfully from conception to the final delivery product and on time confirming the Agile approach as best for Ecommerce software development. In conclusion, the Agile methodology is the choice approach based on reviewed literature, the research results, and the prototype construction. These results will help in critical decision making regarding an appropriate development methodology to follow for the Ecommerce industry in the Western Cape.

Orientador: Nilson Ghirardello / Resumo: Durante o século XIX, principalmente a partir de 1850, o império brasileiro planejou a instalação de colônias militares que deveriam ser implantadas por todo o território. Enquanto na maioria dos países o problema é a falta de espaço geográfico, no Brasil, a imensidão de terras constituiu-se como permanente preocupação dos administradores. Assim, as colônias militares tinham por principal função promover a “povoação e cultura agrícola” de determinadas regiões, bem como a de “policiar e proteger” o interior do país. Ambos os modelos, colônias militares e civis, representavam, antes de tudo, um esforço de levar a “civilização” e marcar presença em locais não ocupados ou mal ocupados pelo homem branco. Na província de São Paulo duas colônias foram implantadas: Itapura e Avanhandava; sendo a primeira, motivo de alguns trabalhos acadêmicos, e a segunda jamais pesquisada. O trabalho proposto pretende estudar a Colônia Militar do Avanhandava, buscando definir os primórdios de sua formação, ocupação inicial e administração. Visa ainda, analisar o material textual e cartográfico coletado em Arquivos Públicos sobre a colônia, especialmente plantas e projetos nunca antes trazidos à luz. O objetivo é demonstrar que havia um ideal que estava além de demarcar, vigiar e proteger o território; mas principalmente, implantar estabelecimentos sob projeto racional, cujas bases parecem vir de colônias militares romanas somadas às questões urbanas do século XIX. O propósito era construir em meio à... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: During the nineteenth century, especially from 1850 on, the Brazilian empire planned the installation of military colonies that should be implanted throughout the territory. While in most countries the problem is the lack of geographic space, in Brazil the immensity of territory has been a permanent concern of the administrators. Thus, the military colonies had as main goal to promote the population and also the agricultural culture of certain regions, as well to keep under control and protect the countryside. Both models, military and civilian colonies, were, above all, an effort to bring “civilization” into the interior of the country and to be present in unoccupied or poorly occupied places by the white man. In the Province of São Paulo two colonies were built: Itapura and Avanhandava; being Itapura, subject for some academic research, and Avanhandava has never been studied. This dissertation intends to study the Military Colony of Avanhandava, searching to define the beginnings of formation, initial occupation and administration. It also aims to analyze the textual and cartographic material collected in Public Archives about the colony, especially plants and projects never before brought to light. The objective is to demonstrate there was an ideal that was beyond demarcating, overseeing and protecting the territory; but mainly, the goal of determining settlements under a rational design, whose bases seems to come from roman military colonies added to urban issues of the 1... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

The needs of the consumer are drastically changing with increased awareness, technology, and innovation. Information technology services are no longer part of the support function but a full-scale solution; the increased demand for personalized, real-time, and hassle-free services has burdened software solution providing companies. Over the last decade, Agile project management has gained popularity among various industries and specifically in the Information Technology industry and is often considered a silver bullet to solve different software project management challenges. Agile project management revolutionized the way software projects are developed and organized. However, organizations find it challenging to implement agile principles as the process requires an organization-wide cultural and social transformation. Managers face several barriers when they try to bring agile approaches in traditional organizations regarding technology, mindset, practices. It’s not adequate to just start learning and implementing new ways of working. The transition process needs parallel or equally salient activities of dealing with challenges on the organization and team level. This study provides insights for software organizations willing to undergo an agile transition that needs an initial understanding of various challenges, which can be a potential pitfall in the transition process.

Being able to perform good data analysis is a fundamental part of running any business or organization. One way of enabling data analysis is with a data warehouse system, a type of database that gathers and transforms data from multiple sources and structures it in the goal of simplifying analysis. It is commonly used to provide support in decision-making. Although a data warehouse enables data analysis, it is also relevant to consider how well the system supports analysis. This thesis is a qualitative research that aims to investigate how work domain analysis (WDA) can be used to evaluate the design of a data warehouse system. To do so, a case study at the IT company Norconsult Astando was performed. A data warehouse system was designed for an issue management system and evaluated using the abstraction hierarchy (AH) model. The research done in this thesis showed that analysis was enabled by adopting Kimball’s bottom-up approach and a star schema design with an accumulating snapshot fact table. Through evaluation of the design, it was shown that most of the design choices made for the data warehouse were captured in the AH. It was concluded that with sufficient data collection methods, WDA can be used to a large extent when evaluating a data warehouse system.

Agriculture contamination is very common in karst systems due to the vulnerability of these aquifers. Animal waste is often spread across crop land to enrich the soil with nitrates and phosphates. Herbicides and pesticides are also applied to the crops. The transport of these pollutants through the soil and epikarst is a difficult process to monitor due to the complex, heterogeneous behavior of the groundwater as it makes its way down to the aquifer below. An experimental site at Crumps Cave lended a unique opportunity to monitor the vadose zone at a waterfall in the cave below. A previous dye trace established the connection between an 11.15 m2 grass plot and this underground waterfall. The field design used here, utilizing a rainfall simulator, allowed control of the input of precipitation and tracers to understand more about the movement of stormwater infiltrating the soil and the differences in transport of solute particles and bacteria in the epikarstic zone. Two particle transport experiments were used to better understand these processes. The first trace involved injection of fluorescein dye and sodium chloride. The 2,650 liters of solution were injected over a period of 3.6 hours at a rate of 6.6 cm/hr. An electrical resistivity traverse, perpendicular to the hypothesized straight-line path of the established dye trace connection, showed a peak in lower resistance at the upper epikarst layers 4 hours and 15 minutes after the beginning of the injection. Dye concentrations reached a peak of 1,600 ppb 3 hours and 15 minutes after the beginning of the injection. The conductivity also peaked at this time with a value of 814 µS. This first trace showed that rapid transportation of solutes happened in localized conduits causing a peak of both solutes in the cave before the widespread mobilization of sodium chloride was seen in the epikarst by the resistivity images an hour later. In the second trace, 2,605 liters of a sulphorhodamine dye solution was injected over 180 kg of dairy cattle manure spread on the 11.15 m2 plot of grass for a period of 3.6 hours at a rate of 6.6 cm/hr. Dye concentrations reached a peak of 27 ppm 4 hours and 15 minutes after the beginning of the injection. Fecal coliform reached its first peak of 2,755 MPN (most probable number of viable cells per 100 mL of water) 90 minutes prior to the dye peak and a second peak of 2,481 MPN occurred 15 minutes prior to the dye peak. These results showed that solutes travelling through the soil and epikarst follow similar paths while bacteria prefer conduits that offer more rapid transmission to the underground waterfall.

The telecommunication industry is dominating the world. Most recently there have been technological advancements made in mobile telecommunication. There are currently a few telecommunication organizations in South Africa. These organizations each have their own unique approach to service delivery. The strong competitive nature of the telecommunication industry is taking telecommunications in South Africa to greater heights. All these advancements necessitate the need for better security and controls of the telecommunications networks. RICA legislation was brought into effect to accomplish just this. The research focuses on the contingent use of systems development methodologies in the telecommunication industry in South Africa. The study determines how these telecommunication organizations choose a systems development methodology when developing systems. This study looks at how these organizations are currently implementing system development methodologies to keep up with the changes and competition within the industry. An interpretive approach was used to conduct the research. Four of the leading telecommunication organizations in South Africa were studied by using case studies. Each case study focused on a single telecommunication organization to gain in depth data regarding the use of systems development methodologies. The case studies were conducted by using structured interviews to gain data from multiple sources within the organizations. The data was analyzed using ATLAS.ti and a cross case analysis was done to answer the research questions. The results indicate that there is a contingent use of systems development methodologies within telecommunication organizations. The telecommunication organizations each use criteria to determine which systems development methodology to use. The results of the study indicate that there are different levels of contingency, and it examines how this is accomplished by each organization individually. Each of the organizations has a unique approach when selecting systems development methodologies. The systems development methodologies that are used by the telecommunication organizations are also tailored in some cases. / Thesis (M.Sc. (Computer Science))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

The telecommunication industry is dominating the world. Most recently there have been technological advancements made in mobile telecommunication. There are currently a few telecommunication organizations in South Africa. These organizations each have their own unique approach to service delivery. The strong competitive nature of the telecommunication industry is taking telecommunications in South Africa to greater heights. All these advancements necessitate the need for better security and controls of the telecommunications networks. RICA legislation was brought into effect to accomplish just this. The research focuses on the contingent use of systems development methodologies in the telecommunication industry in South Africa. The study determines how these telecommunication organizations choose a systems development methodology when developing systems. This study looks at how these organizations are currently implementing system development methodologies to keep up with the changes and competition within the industry. An interpretive approach was used to conduct the research. Four of the leading telecommunication organizations in South Africa were studied by using case studies. Each case study focused on a single telecommunication organization to gain in depth data regarding the use of systems development methodologies. The case studies were conducted by using structured interviews to gain data from multiple sources within the organizations. The data was analyzed using ATLAS.ti and a cross case analysis was done to answer the research questions. The results indicate that there is a contingent use of systems development methodologies within telecommunication organizations. The telecommunication organizations each use criteria to determine which systems development methodology to use. The results of the study indicate that there are different levels of contingency, and it examines how this is accomplished by each organization individually. Each of the organizations has a unique approach when selecting systems development methodologies. The systems development methodologies that are used by the telecommunication organizations are also tailored in some cases. / Thesis (M.Sc. (Computer Science))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

Software engineering practices have experienced significant changes over the period of past two decades. Keeping in view the competitive market trends, now is the high time for many organizations to shift from traditional waterfall models to more agile technologies like Scrum [22][23]. A change of this magnitude is often not easy to undertake. The reason that both software engineering techniques are different in many respects, organizations require considerable amount of analysis of the whole transitioning process and possible scenarios that may occur along the way. Small and medium organizations are normally very skeptical to the change of this magnitude. The scale of change is not limited to only software processes, in fact, difficult part is to deal with old attitudes and thinking processes and mold them for the new agile based Scrum development. The process of change therefore need to be understood in the first place and then carefully forwarded to the implementation phase.

Everyone is talking about the software development methods but these methods are categorised into the different parts and the most important are two categories, one is agile software development methods and second is using the traditional software development methods. Agile software methods are relatively considered to be quick and for the small teams. Our main mission is to check which method is better from each other, so for that purpose we go out in the software development market to meet the professional to ask about their satisfaction on these software development methods. Our research is based on to see the suitable method for the professionals; see the challenges on the adoptability of methods and which method is quicker. To perform this study we have gone through a survey questionnaire, and results are analysed by using mixed method approach. Results shows that professionals from both types of methods are satisfied but professionals with traditional methods are more satisfy with their methods with respect to development of quality software, whereas agile professionals are more satisfied with their methods with respect of better communication with their customers. With agility point of view, our study says that both methods have characteristics which support agility but not fully support, so in such case we need to customize features from both types of methodologies.

Organizations have always tried and pushed themselves to bring changes in how they conduct business. They do this to reach the market quickly and achieve customer satisfaction. This master thesis was conducted at a global leader transportation company, Alstom, to investigate Scaled Agile Frameworks (SAFe) adoption in their Sweden Development Centre, identifying SAFe implementation challenges in a safety-related development as a single-case study. For the thesis, two research questions were formulated to identify the implementation challenges and find their reasons. For the data collection of the thesis, semi-structured interviews, self-completion surveys, and relevant research papers were used to serve the purpose of both primary data and secondary data sources. The researchers acted as ethnographers by participating in the company’s daily events and taking notes. The analysis of the collected data was done using the triangulation approach to get reliable results. In addition, researchers also used SAFe core competency assessment to evaluate the business agility of the case organization.The analysis from the collected data resulted in five implementation challenges. The data suggested that the major challenge was insufficient training and lack of agile mindset among the team members. The case organization had invested in training and support for going through the transformation, but the agile training was interrupted in 2019. Since then, the knowledge about SAFe and the agile way of working was acquired based on learning by doing. Based on the data, the researchers concluded that lack of continuous training has resulted in the development over time of other implementation challenges like insufficient self-organization, nonoptimal team size, and lack of clarity when defining role responsibilities. The data also suggested that transparent communication between different levels may still be a challenge. The SAFe assessment that has been conducted resulted in confirm previous result that in some places complemented the identified implementation challenges.  Key Words: Scaling Agile Framework, Implementation challenges, Lean, Waterfall, Self-organization, Continuous learning culture, Safety related development, Business agility, Ethnography.