Context: Distributed software development has become a most desired way of software development. Application of agile development methodologies in distributed environments has taken a new trend in developing software due to its benefits of improved communication and collaboration. Teamwork is an important concept that agile methodologies facilitate and is one of the potential determinants of team performance which was not focused in distributed agile software development. Objectives: This research shed a light on the topic of teamwork in the context of distributed agile software development. The objectives are to identify the factors contributing teamwork of distributed agile teams along with the dependencies between the factors. And, as it is not without challenges to work with unity in a heterogeneous environment, identification of challenges related to teamwork factors of distributed agile teams along with the mitigation strategies is an another objective. Methods: A systematic literature review (SLR) was employed to identify the teamwork factors along with their dependencies and corresponding challenges and mitigation strategies of each teamwork factor from state-of-the-art literature. Quasi-gold standard method was employed as search strategy in SLR to find out the primary studies representing the objective under investigation. Further a survey was conducted with industrial practitioners working in distributed agile projects to validate the findings from state-of-the-art literature. Results: A total of 13 teamwork factors (i.e. team orientation, shared leadership, mutual performance monitoring, backup behavior, feedback, team autonomy, team learning, coordination, communication, trust, collective culture, ease of use of technology, team familiarity), a set of nine dependencies between the teamwork factors and 45 challenges and 41 mitigation strategies related to the teamwork factors were identified from state-of-the-art literature. From survey result, communication, coordination, trust and team orientation were identified as four most important teamwork factors for distributed agile teams. Out of nine dependencies, seven were supported and two were not supported by the practitioners of distributed agile projects. Additionally, nine challenges and 12 mitigation strategies were identified through survey. Conclusions: From this study, we conclude that communication is the top most important factor for successful teamwork of distributed agile teams. And, unlike its prime importance in distributed software development for getting teams work together, trust was identified with a third priority for successful teamwork of distributed agile teams. Similar to the findings of the agile teams, team autonomy was identified with least importance towards the successful teamwork of distributed agile teams. Results of dependencies show that there is need for future research to explore all the dependencies between the teamwork factors. Furthermore, there are teamwork factors with no challenges and mitigation strategies being identified in state-of-the-art literature but later, through survey it was found that practitioners are facing the challenges for that particular teamwork factor. Though, this study identified those missed challenges, due to the limited number of participants involved in the survey, we cannot conclude that these were the only challenges faced in relation to the teamwork. Hence, there is a need to have a dedicated investigation in exploring all the challenges and mitigation strategies, such that it would help the distributed agile teams in attaining the fruitful interactions between them. / H.no. 5-5-289, Prashanth Nagar, Vanasthalipuram, Hyderabad-500070, Andhra Pradesh. India

Context. Due to the uniqueness of software projects there is no single Agile development approach that ideally fits all project contexts. Each software project is unique, whether in its subject area, development team, or project size. Because of this, adapting Agile practices according to project circumstances is a must. There has been a number of literature published discussing Agile practices adaptation topic. However, it is still unclear how to adapt Agile practices. Therefore, researchers as well as practitioners need to find out the knowledge of how the Agile practices adaptation should be applied in software development project. Objectives. In this study we investigate how companies adapt their software development practices when they claim they use Agile software development. Knowledge about this can assist Agile software practitioners to apply Agile practices adaptation in their own context and obtain the most benefit out of Agile software development. Methods. We used systematic literature review using guidelines from Kitchenham and survey in this research study. In the systematic review, a number of relevant article sources were used including peer-reviewed papers and grey literature. Peer-reviewed papers were searched from several electronic databases. Grey literature was also included, which covered books, theses and dissertations, white papers and website/blog articles. The survey was executed using a web based survey tool which invited Agile practitioners from a broad range of industries. In total there are 79 selected literature reviewed in the systematic review comprising 63 peer-reviewed papers and 16 grey literature. Data extraction results were categorized into used and unused Agile practices, adapted practices, additional practices, importance of practices, adaptation challenges and solutions recommended by Agile practitioners. Furthermore, an online survey was conducted with a total of 700 respondents of which 468 responses completed the survey. Only the completed and valid responses were considered in the results analysis. We classify the survey results into several categories: Agile practices usage scale, importance of practices, details of adaptation, Agile practices instruction/guidelines, and Agile practitioners‟ adherence to the instruction/guidelines. Results. Our systematic review shows that some companies used Agile practices in literature with various degrees of adaptation. Several companies creatively used a hybrid of Agile practices from various Agile approaches. In addition, we found that most of the Agile practices, especially in the XP approach, have to be adapted appropriately according to company software development context. On the other hand, survey results show that most of the Scrum practitioners apply Scrum practices without adaptation. Regarding importance of practices, unit testing/Test-Driven Development and continuous integration are identified by XP practitioners as the most important practices. For Scrum practitioners, the most important practices are product/feature backlog and Sprint. Conclusions. Many reasons are discovered why adaptation of Agile practice is necessary e.g. to suit with software development context or for effectiveness reason. Therefore, better support from management and developers is needed to facilitate Agile practices adaptation. Different degrees of adaptation also depend on the type of implemented Agile approach. XP as a technical approach requires more adaptation when compared to project management approach such as Scrum. Findings regarding respondents‟ adherence to the Agile instruction/guidelines indicate the need to improve quality of Agile instructions/guidelines and Agile leadership and enforce the implementation of instructions/guidelines as well. / This thesis investigates how companies adapt their software development practices when they claim they use Agile software development based on the systematic review on Agile literature and an online survey. The derived knowledge from this thesis can assist Agile software practitioners to adapt Agile practices in their own context and maximize the benefit of Agile software development.

Mänskliga faktorer som till exempel kommunikation och tillit påverkar hur människor interagerar med varandra. I agil systemutveckling ingår relationer, samspel och samarbete mellan människor och dessa påverkar om systemutvecklingsprojektet anses framgångsrikt eller ej. Men ofta i systemutvecklingsprojekt så läggs det mer tid på själva tekniken än de sociala aspekterna, där de mänskliga faktorerna i många fall är en avgörande faktor för projektets slutresultat. Syftet med det nuvarande arbetet är att beskriva vilka mänskliga faktorer som är viktiga för att effektivisera samarbete i agila systemutvecklingsprojekt, samt att beskriva hur agil systemutveckling på Trafikverket utförs. Trafikverket ville ha studien genomförd för att resultatet av studien skulle hjälpa till att minska antalet mindre framgångsrika systemutvecklingsprojekt på Trafikverket. Huvudfrågan i arbetet är: Vilka mänskliga faktorer är viktiga för att effektivisera samarbetet mellan verksamhetskunniga och utvecklare i agila systemutvecklingsprojekt? En fallstudie utfördes vid Trafikverket genom sju semistrukturerade intervjuer som följdes upp av enkäter och dokumentstudier. Det sammanlagda resultatet tyder på att för att effektivisera samarbetet mellan verksamhetskunniga och utvecklare i agila systemutvecklingsprojekt på Trafikverket krävs fokus på följande fem mänskliga faktorer: kommunikation, tillit, ledarskap, kunskap och motivation. / Human factors influence how people interact and communicate with each other. Agile system development work consists of relationships, interaction and cooperation between people. These aspects impact the system development project´s results. However, often in system development there is more focus on the technology itself than on the social aspects, where human factors appear to be a decisive factor, in many cases for the project's end result. The purpose of this study is to describe what human factors that can lead to more efficient cooperation in agile software development projects, and to describe how agile system development looks like at Trafikverket. Trafikverket wished this study to be implemented as the study’s results may help to reduce the number of less successful systems development projects at Trafikverket. The main research question in this work is: What human factors are important to make cooperation between customers and developers of agile software development projects more efficient? A case study was conducted at Trafikverket. Data collected from seven semi-structured interviews followed up by questionnaires and document studies was used for the analysis. Conclusion’s suggests that in order to make cooperation between customers and developers in agile system development projects at Trafikverket more efficient five human factors as communication, trust , leadership, knowledge and motivation should be focused.

Abstract—Background: Software Process Improvement (SPI) maturity models have been developed to assist organizations to enhance software quality. Agile methodologies are used to ensure productivity and quality of a software product. Amongst others they are applied in Small and Medium – sized Enterprises (SMEs). However, little is known about the combination of Agile methodologies and SPI maturity models regarding SMEs and the results that could emerge, as all the current SPI models are addressed to larger organizations and all these improvement models are difficult to be used by Small and Medium – sized firms. Combinations of these methodologies could lead to improvement in the quality of the software products, better project management methodologies and organized software development framework. Objectives: The aim of this study is to identify the main Agile methodologies and SPI maturity models applied in SMEs, the combinations of these methodologies, and the results that could emerge. Through these combinations, new software development frameworks are proposed. What is more, the results of this study can be used as a guide with the appropriate combination for each SME, as a better project management methodology or as improvement in the current software engineering practices. Methods: A Systematic Literature Review was conducted, resulting in 71 selected relevant papers ranging from 2001 to 2013. Besides, a survey has been performed from June 2013 to October 2013, including 49 participants. Results: Seven Agile methodologies and six different SPI maturity models were identified and discussed. Furthermore, the combination of eight different Agile methodologies and Software Process Improvement maturity models is presented, and as well as their benefits and drawbacks that could emerge in Small and Medium – sized firms. Conclusion: The majority of the Agile methodologies and SPI maturity models are addressed to large or very large enterprises. Thus, little research has been conducted for SMEs. The combinations of the Agile methodologies and SPI maturity models are usually performed in experimental stages. However, it has been observed that such type of combination could present numerous benefits, which can also be applicable in SMEs as well. The combinations that are most common are the CMMI and XP, CMMI and Scrum, CMMI and Six Sigma, and the PRINCE2 and DSDM. / 0034-636835645

Agile programming methods have become popular in software development projects. These methods increase productivity and support teamwork processes. In this thesis, we have analyzed three well-known Agile methods - Scrum, Extreme Programming and Crystal Orange - from the perspective of situated cognition to investigate how well the methods support cognition. Specifically, we looked at how the methods aid memory and attention through the use of external representations. The study suggests that the methods support different aspects of situated cognition reasonably well. However, among the investigated methods, Scrum stands out due to aspects of task representation (progress charts), its approaches to externalize what-to-do (memory), and the means to focus on the important programming tasks for the day (attention).

The quality of a product depends on the quality of the underlying process is a well known fact. Software development organizations have been struggling to decrease their cost, increase their ROI, reduce time-to-market, and enhance the quality of their products. This all depends upon the improvement in the processes they are following inside their organizations. A number of software process improvement models exist in market, e.g., CMMI, SPICE and Automotive SPICE. But before an organization can improve its development and management processes, it is very important to know whether it is following the right processes. There exist a number of software development process models, mainly categorized into Traditional and Agile, which provide the step-by-step guidance to develop and manage the software projects.The current thesis presents a study of software process improvement models in automotive industry, their weaknesses and strengths and presents a comparison of how do they relate to each other. This thesis also explores some software development models which are more famous in automotive industry, and the applicability of process improvement models in conjunction with the Agile software development models. A case study was performed at an automotive software supplier organization to investigate the experience of combining Agile practices with organization’s company-tailored software development model that was incorporating Automotive SPICE standards.

Agile methods change the software processes. Agile processes such as Scrum, ExtremeProgramming (XP), Open Unified Process (OpenUP) etc. have techniques that improve softwarequality. No doubt that the purpose of these techniques is to inject quality assurance into theproject under development. This thesis presents quality assurance techniques in Open UnifiedProcess (OpenUP) along with comparative study to extreme programming (XP) for agilesoftware development. OpenUP is an agile and unified process that contains the minimal set ofpractices that help teams to be more effective in developing software. It assists to achieve qualityby an iterative and incremental approach with artifacts, checklists, guidelines, disciplines androles. On the other side XP emphasizes on values such as communication, feedback, respect,and courage. In addition, XP prescribes a collection of techniques, which aim to improvesoftware quality. Both these processes have the same purpose, to develop software that meets the stakeholder’sneeds and expectations, however they uses different approaches to achieve their goals. Thisthesis compares both processes in four different points of view, by comparing their qualitytechniques, focus in time, and cost of usage and social perspective. We have proposed an extrarole of the quality coordinator (QC) in OpenUP/XP. QC can support and coordinate project inall quality assurance activities. The objective of an extra role is to use the knowledge of QC toachieve highest possible product quality in software development process.Keywords: Agile Development, Quality assurance (QA), Open unified process (OpenUP),extreme programming (XP), Quality coordinator (QC)

Recent years have witnessed that standard telecommunication services evolved more and more to next generation value-added services. This fact is accompanied by a change of service characteristics as new services are designed to fulfil the customer’s demands instead of just focussing on technologies and protocols. These demands can be very specific and, therefore, diverse potential service functionalities have to be considered by the service providers. To make matters worse for service providers, a fast transition from concept to market product and low price of a new service is required due to the increasing competition in the telecommunication industry. Therefore, effective test solutions need to be developed that can be integrated in current value-added service development life-cycles. Besides, these solutions should support the involvement of all participating stakeholders such as the service provider, the test developers as well as the service developers, and, in order to consider an agile approach, also the service customer. This thesis proposes a novel framework for functional testing that is based on a new sort of description language for value-added services (Service Test Description). Based on instances of the Service Test Description, sets of reusable test components described by means of an applied Statecharts notation are automatically selected and composed to so-called behaviour models. From the behaviour models, abstract test cases can be automatically generated which are then transformed to TTCN-3 test cases and then assembled to an Executable Test Suite. Within a TTCN-3 test system, the Executable Test Suite can be executed against the corresponding value-added service referred to as System Under Test. One benefit of the proposed framework is its application within standard development life-cycles. Therefore, the thesis presents a methodology that considers both service development and test development as parallel tasks and foresees procedures to synchronise the tasks and to allow an agile approach with customer involvement. The novel framework is validated through a proof-of-concept working prototype. Example value-added services have been chosen to illustrate the whole process from compiling instances of the Service Test Description until the execution of automated tests. Overall, this thesis presents a novel solution for service providers to improve the quality of their provided value-added services through automated functional testing procedures. It enables the early involvement of the customers into the service development life-cycle and also helps test developers and service developers to collaborate.

Mänskliga faktorer som till exempel kommunikation och tillit påverkar hur människor interagerar med varandra. I agil systemutveckling ingår relationer, samspel och samarbete mellan människor och dessa påverkar om systemutvecklingsprojektet anses framgångsrikt eller ej. Men ofta i systemutvecklingsprojekt så läggs det mer tid på själva tekniken än de sociala aspekterna, där de mänskliga faktorerna i många fall är en avgörande faktor för projektets slutresultat. Syftet med det nuvarande arbetet är att beskriva vilka mänskliga faktorer som är viktiga för att effektivisera samarbete i agila systemutvecklingsprojekt, samt att beskriva hur agil systemutveckling på Trafikverket utförs. Trafikverket ville ha studien genomförd för att resultatet av studien skulle hjälpa till att minska antalet mindre framgångsrika systemutvecklingsprojekt på Trafikverket. Huvudfrågan i arbetet är: Vilka mänskliga faktorer är viktiga för att effektivisera samarbetet mellan verksamhetskunniga och utvecklare i agila systemutvecklingsprojekt? En fallstudie utfördes vid Trafikverket genom sju semistrukturerade intervjuer som följdes upp av enkäter och dokumentstudier. Det sammanlagda resultatet tyder på att för att effektivisera samarbetet mellan verksamhetskunniga och utvecklare i agila systemutvecklingsprojekt på Trafikverket krävs fokus på följande fem mänskliga faktorer: kommunikation, tillit, ledarskap, kunskap och motivation. / Human factors influence how people interact and communicate with each other. Agile system development work consists of relationships, interaction and cooperation between people. These aspects impact the system development project´s results. However, often in system development there is more focus on the technology itself than on the social aspects, where human factors appear to be a decisive factor, in many cases for the project's end result. The purpose of this study is to describe what human factors that can lead to more efficient cooperation in agile software development projects, and to describe how agile system development looks like at Trafikverket. Trafikverket wished this study to be implemented as the study’s results may help to reduce the number of less successful systems development projects at Trafikverket. The main research question in this work is: What human factors are important to make cooperation between customers and developers of agile software development projects more efficient? A case study was conducted at Trafikverket. Data collected from seven semi-structured interviews followed up by questionnaires and document studies was used for the analysis. Conclusion’s suggests that in order to make cooperation between customers and developers in agile system development projects at Trafikverket more efficient five human factors as communication, trust , leadership, knowledge and motivation should be focused.

Nowadays, Agile software development methods are often used in large multisite organizations that develop large-scale applications. Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is a relatively new Agile software development process where the development process starts with acceptance tests written in a natural language. The premise of BDD is to create a common and effective process of communication between different roles in a software project to ensure that every activity can be mapped to the business goal of the application. This thesis work aims to find an effective and efficient BDD process and to evaluate its usage in a large-scale application in a large multisite organization through a series of interviews, a controlled experiment, and an online survey. Furthermore, by means of the aforementioned experiment, the study measures the impact of an experimental usage of BDD on testing quality. To discover an effective and efficient BDD process, two alternatives with automated tests that run on different architectural layers, namely client layer and web service layer, were examined. Based on the defined metrics, the alternative with automated tests that ran directly on the web service layer was chosen as the more efficient process which was compared against the existing Agile-based baseline that used automated client tests. The results show that an efficient BDD process improves the testing quality significantly which can, in turn, result in a better overall software quality.