ABSTRACT Due to the change of consumption patterns, the shorter product life cycle coupled with the global competitions, how to provide customers quickly the best quality of products and to maintain a certain profit in changing markets , become the best weapon when competitions. So companies have to put in efforts in supply chain management, from raw material supply to product sales, distribution, various species of strategies set to achieve the best management of the results. The most widely discussed and use of supply chain strategies , that is lean and agile strategies . The purpose of this study is to discuss the impact on supply chain capability and business performance with the implementation of lean strategy and agile strategy , and using the questionnaires, to specify the statistics showing the correspondence of lean /supply chain strategy and business performance.

In the 1990s, software projects became larger in size and more complicated in structure. The traditional development processes were not able to answer the needs of these growing projects. Comprehensive documentation in traditional methodologies made processes slow and discouraged the developers. Testing, after all code is written, was time consuming, too costly and made error correction and debugging much harder. Fixing the code at the end of the project also affects the internal quality of the software. Agile software development processes evolved to bring quick solutions to these existing problems of the projects. Test Driven Development (TDD) is a technique, used in many agile methodologies, that suggests minimizing documentation, writing automated tests before implementing the code and frequently run tests to get immediate feedback. The aim is to increase software productivity by shortening error correction duration and increase software quality by providing rapid feedback to the developer. In this thesis work, a software project is developed with TDD and compared with a control project developed using traditional development techniques in terms of software productivity and software quality. In addition, TDD project is compared with an early work in terms of product quality. The benefits and the challenges of TDD are also investigated during the whole process.

The approach proposed in this thesis contributes to implementing source code reuse and re-engineering techniques for agile software development. This work includes an introduction to feature models and some of the Feature Oriented Software Development (FOSD) practices to achieve a lightweight way of retrieving source code. A Feature model created during the course of following FOSD practices serves as an additional layer of documentation which represents the problem space for the developed application. This thesis proposes linking source code with such a feature model for the purpose of identifying and retrieving code. This mechanism helps with accessing the code segment corresponding to a feature with minimal effort, thus suits agile development methods. At the moment, there is a gap between feature oriented approaches and agile methods. This thesis tries to close this gap between high-level approaches for software modelling (feature modelling) and agile methods for software development.

<p>Litteratur inom systemutvecklingsområdet visar behov av nya snabbare systemutvecklingsmetoder. Orsaken är komplexiteten både i systemutvecklings</p><p>projekten och i organisationer, där systemutveckling sker. Nu föredras små projekt, som omfattar färre än tio deltagare och genomförs på mindre än ett år. De traditionella systemutvecklingsmetoder anses vara lämpliga för stora projekt. Det finns nya systemutvecklingsmetoder, som får benämningen dynamiska metoder, för små projekt. I detta examensarbete studeras faktorer för två dynamiska metoder som gör dem lämpliga för små projekt. De två dynamiska metoderna som kommer att studeras är Extreme Programming och en specifik dokumenterad anpassning av RUP.</p><p>Syftet med detta examensarbete är att studera metoddokumentationen för två dynamiska metoder för att reda ut i vilken utsträckning de passar för små projekt. Ett ytterligare syfte är att genom analys av andras erfarenheter om tillämpningar av de två metoderna redogöra för det som styrker argumenten om deras lämplighet för små projekt.</p><p>För att besvara frågeställningen studerades litteratur och ett antal artiklar. Två telefonintervjuer genomfördes också för att besvara en av de två delfrågorna, som tillsammans utgör frågeställningen för denna studie. Resultatet visar att den specifikt dokumenterade anpassade RUP inte följer alla aspekter för små projekt. Däremot följer Extreme Programming alla de aspekterna.</p>

<p>Customer Demand Uncertainty is a big obstacle for companies to sustain their competitiveness in the market that responding customer requirements becomes essential. Besides companies need to consider also their cost structures which should have in high consistency to survive as well. Lean and Agile terminologies have been investigated so far in cost and responsiveness to customer manner within internal system perspective i.e. product volume and variety. This thesis aims to link lean manufacturing steps with customer demand uncertainty condition following information systems, marketing issues and human factor for management level in framework that firm’s (manufacturer) current condition can be tested according to answers from questionnaires and implementation of assessment tables since it is used as guideline and provides on which level firms are in demand uncertainty, lean and agile manufacturing. This support enables to firms to create their own flexible leagile decoupling point according to their interior characteristics and capabilities in the market.</p>

<p>The reverse part of the supply chain becomes more and more important due to the legislation, environmental concerns, higher volumes of returns, etc. As a result, companies cannot see the reverse supply chain as the additional costs only and have to think strategically. The right strategy for the reverse supply chain can help to achieve the competitive advantage. However, there are not so many researches made about strategies for the reverse supply chain yet, contrarily to the forward supply chain. Therefore, the need to adopt strategies for the reverse supply chain appears.</p><p>The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the applicability of the Lean and the Agile concepts in the Reverse Supply Chain strategy, and to investigate the driving forces and challenges for the implementation of the strategy in the Reverse Supply Chain.</p><p>The inductive research approach was applied in this thesis<em>.</em> The qualitative study was the most suitable for the better understanding of the point of view, the attitudes, the perceptions of the interviewed participants regarding a wide range of issues related to the choice, and the implementation of the strategy for the reverse supply chain. Multiple case studies as the research strategy was chosen, thus data was collected from 13 interviews conducted at four companies: Fläkt Woods, Systemair, Swegon and Rettig ICC.</p><p>The main conclusions from the analysis of the applicability of the lean and the agile concepts in the reverse supply chain are that the design of the reverse supply chain depends on the characteristics of the returns: the size, the volume, the life cycle, the B2B or the B2C returns; as well the reasons for the returns: the guarantee service/ after warranty service. When weighting the results about the lean and the agile concepts implementation in the reverse supply chain, it appears relatively more likely that none of the companies implement either only the lean or only the agile approach. Due to various reasons, there are different material flows and they require different strategic approaches. The agility is implemented close to the customer in order to ensure speed and high responsiveness. Lean flows are implemented from the manufacturer to the supplier or the third party (recycler, etc.). Even more, the companies seek to find the optimal combination of both strategies, or as it called – leagile. Two different approaches for leagile concept’s implementation are used: preponement and de-coupling point. Driving forces for the strategy implementation are green forces, increasing the demand for improving customer service level, cost reduction, and the new retail marketing strategies. Main challenges for the strategy implementation are the lack of formal operating procedures, the lack of information sharing with the suppliers, ‘false alarm’ returns, the lack of local competence, and the lack of forecasting possibilities.</p>

We mainly study development velocity in agile teams in this dissertation. The concept of development velocity relates to the classical problem of time estimation in software development and software development planning. Building on previous literature as well as a case study, we explore and theorize the factors that cause ‘velocity flux’, i.e. fluctuations in development velocity through studying the relationship between development velocity and the rate of incoming customer feature requests. The aim of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of what causes velocity flux in agile development, and discusses the implications of the findings for research and practical implications for agile planning. As a result, we propose nine factors that cause velocity flux, and provide some strategies to overcome them in order to make a more effective sprint planning in agile teams.

Large-scale software development companies delivering market-driven products have introduced agile methodologies as the way of working to a big extent. Even though there are many benefits with an agile way of working, problems occur when scaling agile because of the increased complexity. One explicit problem area is to evolve deep product knowledge, which is a domain specific knowledge that cannot be developed anywhere else but at the specific workplace. This research aims to identify impediments for developing domain specific knowledge and provide solutions to overcome these challenges in order to optimize knowledge growth and throughput. The result of the research shows that impediments occur in four different categories, based on a framework for knowledge sharing drivers. These are people-related, task-related, structure-related and technology-related. The challenging element with knowledge growth is to integrate the training into the feature development process, without affecting the feature throughput negatively. The research also shows that by increasing the knowledge sharing, the competence level of the whole organization can be increased, and thereby be beneficial from many perspectives, such as feature-throughput and code quality.

This study examines how Design principles affect the view of Usability in Agile development. This case study has been conducted together with Uppsala Municipality’s Development department. The Design principles from Användningsforum and Government Digital Service are studied together with Agile development strategy to determine the influence on Usability. This is an empirical inductive study where data is collected and analyzed so that a theory may be presented. The thesis is based on qualitative data gathered from Uppsala Municipality’s development project and focus on the experience and attitude of the developers in the department. Data is collected through interviews and observations of the team members. Data is analyzed with Grounded theory approach. From the results it is concluded that the Design principles influence members of the department's awareness and focus on Usability when work with Agile development project.

One of the most emphasised software testing activities in an Agile environment is the usage of the Test Driven Development (TDD) approach. TDD is a development activity where test cases are created by developers before writing the code, and all for the purpose of guiding the actual development process. In other words, test cases created when following TDD could be considered as a by-product of software development. However, TDD is not fully adopted by the industry, as indicated by respondents from our industrial survey who pointed out that TDD is the most preferred but least practised activity. Our further research identified seven potentially limiting factors for industrial adoption of TDD, out of which one of the prominent factor was lack of developers’ testing skills. We subsequently defined and categorised appropriate quality attributes which describe the quality of test case design when following TDD. Through a number of empirical studies, we have clearly established the effect of “positive test bias”, where the participants focused mainly on the functionality while generating test cases. In other words, there existed less number of “negative test cases” exercising the system beyond the specified functionality, which is an important requirement for high reliability systems. On an average, in our studies, around 70% of test cases created by the participants were positive while only 30% were negative. However, when measuring defect detecting ability of those sets of test cases, an opposite ratio was observed. Defect detecting ability of negative test cases were above 70% while positive test cases contributed only by 30%. We propose a TDDHQ concept as an approach for achieving higher quality testing in TDD by using combinations of quality improvement aspects and test design techniques to facilitate consideration of unspecified requirements during the development to a higher extent and thus minimise the impact of potentially inherent positive test bias in TDD. This way developers do not necessarily focus only on verifying functionality, but they can as well increase security, robustness, performance and many other quality improvement aspects for the given software product. An additional empirical study, evaluating this method, showed a noticeable improvement in the quality of test cases created by developers utilising TDDHQ concept. Our research findings are expected to pave way for further enhancements to the way of performing TDD, eventually resulting in better adoption of it by the industry.