Companies must be flexible and adaptable to compete in today's market. Those with such skills can better meet changing customer needs. Customization can add value by meeting customers' specific needs. Engineer-to-order (ETO) is used as a strategy to meet customer needs. High-mix, low-volume products are promoted. This creates uncertainty about the demand that the organization needs to deal with in a fast and efficient way, which results in applying agile as an approach to dealing with uncertainty. In addition, the organization needs to be more resilient to the vulnerability to which the market exposes the organization. However, at the same time, the organization needs the ability to make sense of the state of its environment, detect new threats, adopt new technologies and organizational attributes, and contribute to its resilience. However, it is unclear how to simultaneously develop an agile-based manufacturing strategy and a more resilient organization. Evidently, research is limited regarding the management of both the ability to move quickly and easily (Agile) and the organization's capacity to rapidly adapt to and respond to all types of risks (Resilience) within complex ETO organizations. In light of this, the purpose of this study is to investigate how agile and resilient practices can be implemented in ETO organizations to facilitate the production of complex or specialized products, as well as the capacity to absorb stress, recover essential functionality, and thrive under altered conditions. This study has primarily adopted a qualitative methodology, which uses both a case study approach and a literature review. The case study is based on interviews, a document study, and questionaries. The result from this study presents critical areas to improve from the point of view of agile and resilient practices so that the organization can have better performance and productivity. Improving areas such as communication, management style, the development of a model and knowledge management, the desired organizational structure, and the customer's role is essential in order to increase the organization's efficiency and decrease its uncertainty and risks.

The recent generation of Agile Earth Observation Satellite (AEOS) has emerged to be highly effective due to its increased attitude maneuvering capabilities. However, due to these increased degrees of freedom in maneuverability, the scheduling problem has become increasingly difficult than its non-agile predecessors. The AEOS scheduling problem consists of finding an optimal assignment of user-requested imaging tasks to the respective AEOSs in their orbits by satisfying the operational resource constraints in a specified time frame. Some of these tasks might require imaging the same area of interest (AOI) multiple times, while in some tasks, the AOIs are too large for the AEOS to image in a single attempt. Some tasks might even arise while the AEOSs are preoccupied with existing tasks. This thesis focuses on formulating the AEOS scheduling models where onboard energy and memory constraints while operating and the task specifications are diverse. A mixed-integer non-linear scheduling problem with a reward factor has been considered in order to handle multiple scan requirements for a task. Although initially, it is assumed that the AOIs are small, this work is extended to a three-stage optimization framework to handle the segmentation of large AOIs into smaller regions that can be imaged in a single scan. The uncertainty regarding scan failure is handled through a Markov Decision Process (MDP). These two proposed methods have significant benefits when tasks are available to schedule prior to the mission. However, they lack the flexibility to accommodate newly arrived tasks during the mission. When multiple new tasks arrive during the mission, predictive scheduling based on learning historical data of task arrivals is proposed, which can schedule tasks in an online manner faster than complete rescheduling and minimize disruption from the original schedule. Evolutionary optimization-based solution methodologies are proposed to solve these models and are validated with simulations. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Test case design and generation is a tedious manual process that requires 40-70% of the software test life cycle. The test cases written manually by inexperienced testers may not offer a complete coverage of the requirements. Frequent changes in requirements reduce the reusability of the manually written test cases costing more time and effort. Most projects in the industry follow a Behavior-Driven software development approach to capturing requirements from the business stakeholders through user stories written in natural language. Instead of writing test cases manually, this thesis investigates a practical solution for automatically generating test cases within an Agile software development workflow using natural language-based user stories and acceptance criteria. However, the information provided by the user story is insufficient to create test cases using natural language processing (NLP), so we have introduced two new input parameters, Test Scenario Description and Dictionary, to improve the test case generation process. To establish the feasibility, we developed a tool that uses NLP techniques to generate functional test cases from the free-form test scenario description automatically. The tool reduces the effort required to create the test cases while improving the test coverage and quality of the test suite. Results from the feasibility study are presented in this thesis. / Master of Science

Agile manufacturing has become a topic of great interest over the past several years. The entire domain of modeling and analyzing different types of agile manufacturing environments and systems, however, remain largely unexplored. The objective of this research is to provide fundamental insight into how manufacturing systems should be designed and reconfigured over time in order to cope with different agile manufacturing environments. To achieve this objective, three approaches are developed and integrated into one simulation-based model. The first approach is used to model different agile manufacturing environments. The second approach is used to define various ways in which manufacturing systems can be designed and reconfigured (i.e., design/reconfiguration strategies). The third comprises the cost and objective functions used to measure system performance when different design/reconfiguration strategies are used in different agile manufacturing environments. Based upon the assumptions adopted during this thesis, the experimental work performed suggests that despite the fact that agility incurs high costs, agile manufacturing systems are indeed necessary for certain manufacturing environments in which product life cycles are short yet demand per product type is high. Therefore, it is important in certain manufacturing environments to focus on reconfiguration in short periods of time, even at the expense of higher reconfiguration costs. / Master of Science

Yes / There is an agreement among European countries about the need to achieve efficient, effective and responsive evacuations as part of disaster management. Evacuations face uncertain and dynamic conditions, which often challenge the expectations at the planning stage. This research looks at the adoption of agility in evacuation operations. Managers involved in disaster operations in three countries were interviewed to identify current practices and needs during evacuations. This article looks at the potential of beneficiary engagement, staff and information, cooperation, and fitness for change to incorporate agile practices at each one of the stages of evacuation planning. The purpose is to provide an Agile Evacuation Operations (AEO) evidence-based framework to inform theory and practice. The analysis provided shows that along with current practices it is important to engage the beneficiaries more closely, empower and train the staff to react to unexpected conditions, and take advantage of local knowledge to enhance operations. / The data collection was funded with the support of the European Commission, Directorate-General Home Affairs.

<p>The Thesis purpose is in the context of system development validate the Scrum Methodology. Projects concerning information technology are difficult to manage and tend to fail in quality, time or costs. Scrum presents a new view of the system development. Better cooperation between customers and developers, continuous follow-up on daily basis and extensive communication in the development team are all characteristics of Scrum. Scrum is described as a new paradigm by its founders but has been criticized by experts of system development too. This Thesis discuss if Scrum is a better way to develop software than older models like the Rational Unified Process and the Spiral Model with focus in five factors. The result of the study is that Scrum has given system development new ways to manage requirements and methods to push the project forward. Lack of management commitment and user involvement can be better with Scrum if the model is used in the right way. Answers concerning coding and testing differ between the respondents in the study which makes it different to make conclusions regarding this factor.</p> / <p>Syftet med uppsatsen är att i en systemutvecklingskontext beskriva de problem som gör att IT-projekt misslyckas och utvärdera om användningen av den agila utvecklingsmodellen Scrum reducerar problemen. IT-projekt tenderar att misslyckas och de bakomliggande orsakerna är flera. Uppsatsen grupperar misslyckande av IT-projekt i fem faktorer. Ledningsstöd, användarmedverkan, projektstyrning, kravhantering samt kodning och test. Scrum är en agil systemutvecklingsmodell som av sina skapare beskrivits som ett paradigmskifte inom systemutvecklingen. Korta tidsintervaller, självgående systemutvecklare, daglig uppföljning är några av Scrums kännetecken. För att besvara syftet har en kvalitativ datainsamlingsmetod använts. En intervjuserie med tio intervjuer och en observation ligger till grund för undersökningens resultat. All insamlad data är insamlad på fallföretaget Banverket Verksamhetsstöd IT. Undersökningen har visat att Scrum ger en del nya angreppssätt främst avseende projektstyrning och kravhantering. Scrum innehåller möjligheter för ökad användarmedverkan och ledningsstöd men det krävs konkreta åtgärder från projektorganisationen om det ska lyckas fullt ut. Uppfattningar kring kodning och test skiljer sig åt beroende på vilken respondent som frågas. Det tyder på att det saknas tydliga rutiner i det här avseendet. Slutsatsen blir därmed att Scrum reducerar några av de problem som finns i IT-projekt och därmed med fördel kan användas som en best practice.</p>