Transitions during adolescence can be difficult, but for youth in custody, transitions present a unique set of challenges (Collins, 2001), particularly when moving out of custody and into the community. Considerable research has been done on youth in custody, but few researchers have asked youth for their own thoughts about their future and return to the community. This qualitative study was conducted to explore the possible selves of seven youth in the Victoria Youth Custody Centre in Victoria, BC. Elicited through the Possible Selves Mapping Process (Marshall & Guenette, 2011) and semi-structured interviews, the youth described a number of hoped-for selves, including getting out of the system, not returning to jail, concern for their families, and educational and work aspirations. Feared selves included returning to custody, not being successful in life, and returning to their criminal ways. Participants also identified supports and barriers related to their release. Supports included professionals, programs, and establishing healthy relationships in their lives. Perceived barriers included drugs and alcohol, poor peer relations, and repercussions of their criminal lifestyle. The results have important implications for research, practice and policy regarding youth in custody. / Graduate

There has been a significant interest in the estimation of time and effort in fixing defects among both software practitioners and researchers over the past two decades. However, most of the focus has been on prediction of time and effort in resolving bugs, or other low level tasks, without much regard to predicting time needed to complete high-level requirements, a critical step in release planning. In this thesis, we describe a mixed-method empirical study on three large IBM projects in which we developed and evaluated a process of training a predictive model constituting a set of 29 features in nine categories in order to predict if whether or not a requirement will be completed within its planned iteration. We conducted feature engineering through iterative interviews with IBM software practitioners as well as analysis of large development and project management repositories of these three projects. Using machine learning techniques, we were able to make predictions on requirement completion time at four different stages of requirement lifetime. Using our industrial partner’s interest in high precision over recall, we then adopted a cost sensitive learning method and maximized precision of predictions (ranging from 0.8 to 0.97) while maintaining an acceptable recall. We also ranked the features based on their relative importance to the optimized predictive model. We show that although satisfying predictions can be made at early stages, even on the first day of requirement creation, performance of predictions improves over time by taking advantage of requirements’ progress data. Furthermore, feature importance ranking results show that although importance of features are highly dependent on project and prediction stage, there are certain features (e.g. requirement creator, time remained to the end of iteration, time since last requirement summary change and number of times requirement has been replanned for a new iteration) that emerge as important across most projects and stages, implying future worthwhile research directions for both researchers and practitioners. / Graduate

Strategic release planning (road-mapping) is an important phase of requirements engineering process performed at product level. It is concerned with selection and assignment of requirements in sequences of releases such that important technical and resource constraints are fulfilled. It is always considered difficult to form a strategic release plan due to varying constraints and uncertainties. In this regard, different strategic release planning models have been presented in academia and different methods are being used in Industry. In this thesis, strategic release planning models presented in academia and some methods of strategic release planning being used in Industry are identified. The contributions of these models are also provided in the thesis. A systematic review has been performed to know strategic release planning models in academia. The aim of systematic review is to present fair evaluation of research concerning strategic release planning models. Through systematic review, requirements selection factors considered by a model, validation details of model and a model’s usefulness for bespoke and market-driven development are summarized. Moreover two organizations have been interviewed to know strategic release planning models being used in Industry in addition to the ones presented in academia. Similarly contribution of models being used in Industry is provided by logging details of requirements selection factors, validation details and usefulness for bespoke and market-driven software development of each model / process of Industry. Based on systematic review and industrial interviews’ results, a list of common requirements selection factors (considered by models of academia and Industry) is provided. Some general recommendations have been given for research in academia on strategic release planning models after analysis of systematic review and industrial interviews’ results. / Strategisk release planering (väg-kartläggning) är en viktig fas av requirements engineering process som utförs på produktnivå. Det handlar om urval och tilldelning av kraven i sekvenser av utsläpp så att viktiga tekniska och resurser är uppfyllda. Det är alltid anses svårt att skapa en strategisk release planen på grund av olika begränsningar och osäkerheter. I detta avseende olika strategiska release planering modeller har presenterats i den akademiska världen och olika metoder som används inom industrin. I denna avhandling, strategisk release planering modeller i den akademiska världen och vissa metoder för strategisk release planering som används inom industrin har identifierats. Bidraget från dessa modeller är också i avhandlingen. En systematisk genomgång har gjorts att veta strategisk release planering modeller i den akademiska världen. Syftet med systematisk översyn är att presentera en rättvis utvärdering av forskning om strategisk release planering modeller. Genom systematisk genomgång, krav urval faktorer betraktas som en modell, validering uppgifter om modell och en modell nyttan för beställda och marknadsdriven utveckling sammanfattas. Dessutom två organisationer som har intervjuats att veta strategisk release planering modeller som används inom industrin och utöver de åtgärder som presenteras i den akademiska världen. Likaså bidrag av modeller som används inom industrin ges genom att logga information om kraven urval faktorer, validering information och nytta för den beställda och marknadsdrivna mjukvaruutvecklingen av varje modell/process industri. Baserat på systematisk genomgång och industriell intervjuer resultat, en förteckning över gemensamma krav urval faktorer (som av modeller av den akademiska världen och industrin) tillhandahålls. Några allmänna rekommendationer har fått för forskning i den akademiska världen på strategisk release planering modeller efter analys av systematisk översyn och industriell intervjuer resultat. / +46765541016, +46762920070

This thesis aims to clarify the use of Excel for capacity planning, how an excel-based capacityplanning tool works, and to present a way to implement a web system suitable for ad-hoc capacity and release planning. Capacity design is a critical part of flexible software development teams. Excel spreadsheets are flexible but not ideal for large organizations where many users have access to and can change planning concurrently. The existing tool received low ratings in terms of helpfulness, robustness to the inappropriate user, universality, flexibility, and aesthetics but performed quite well in clarity, consistency, memorability, overall efficiency, and third-party safety. The tool had some additional benefits, including calculating team capacity, preventing overplanning of individual development teams, and the ability to register the outcome of past planning periods. We implemented a web system based on Blazor Web to support the tasks provided by the existing tool, including capacity planning and release planning. The web system also supported role-based authorization. This web system was evaluated in a usability survey and maintained most of the provided functionality of the existing tool while avoiding some of the tool’s usability-related problems.