Creating Minimum Viable Products in Industry-Academia Collaborations

Customer value determines how products and services succeed in the marketplace. Early assessment of customer value is important for software startups, spin-off companies, and new product development in existing companies. Software technology often influences customer value and typically defines the main competitive advantage in both entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial settings. Value-related feedback from real customers is needed during software development and maintenance, and decision-making should be increasingly based on empirical evidence acquired through experiments. Getting such value-related feedback usually requires a so-called minimum viable product (MVP), i.e., an artefact that is far away from being mature with respect to functionality or quality, but displays characteristics that allows determining its customer value. In this article we report on a case study which used industry-academia collaboration for creating such an MVP. Our goal was to identify strengths and weaknesses of such a way of creating MVPs while providing practical recommendations for improvement. The process followed in the case study was found to be very suitable in creating MVPs, reducing company-specific risks with respect to testing customer-value, and advancing university education.Peer reviewe

Service Provisioning: Insights in a digital business context

This position paper presents an overview of key insights in relation to the provisioning of IT services in the digital business context. These insights, as derived from relevant academic and practitioner literature and engagement with patrons and members of the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) global consortium, have informed the development of IVI’s IT-CMF Service Provisioning (SRP) Critical Capability (CC). Additionally, changes to the SRP CC improve the alignment of the capability with the ISO 20000 standard and the ITIL framework. They also reflect digital changes such as the virtualization, automation, and orchestration of IT infrastructure, and support the growing prevalence of Agile and DevOps approaches [1]

Service Provisioning: Insights in a digital business context

This position paper presents an overview of key insights in relation to the provisioning of IT services in the digital business context. These insights, as derived from relevant academic and practitioner literature and engagement with patrons and members of the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) global consortium, have informed the development of IVI’s IT-CMF Service Provisioning (SRP) Critical Capability (CC). Additionally, changes to the SRP CC improve the alignment of the capability with the ISO 20000 standard and the ITIL framework. They also reflect digital changes such as the virtualization, automation, and orchestration of IT infrastructure, and support the growing prevalence of Agile and DevOps approaches [1]

THE MULTIFACTOR MATHEMATICAL MODEL FOR CONSTRUCTING A MULTITUDE OF CONSISTENT EDUCATIONAL PATHS FOR TRAINING FULL STACK SPECIALISTS

The modern labor market, especially in the field of information technology startups, requires the training of a sufficiently large number of specialists with competencies in creating the minimum viable product (MVP). The educational organization should be able to quickly form the trajectory of specialist training based on the challenges of the labor market, taking into account the dynamics of its change, while maintaining the integrity and consistency of the educational program. The mathematical model of the formation of an educational program is proposed taking into account a large number of variable parameters, which allows one to construct many possible training paths for specialists and select the optimal ones according to the criteria of cost, efficiency or laboriousness

Fast Feedback Cycles in Empirical Software Engineering Research

Background/Context: Gathering empirical knowledge is a time consuming task and the results from empirical studies often are soon outdated by new technological solutions. As a result, the impact of empirical results on software engineering practice is often not guaranteed. Objective/Aim: In this paper, we summarize the ongoing discussion on ”Empirical Software Engineering 2.0” as a way to improve the impact of empirical results on indus- trial practices. We propose a way to combine data mining and analysis with domain knowledge to enable fast feedback cycles between researchers and practitioners. Method: We identify the key concepts on gathering fast feedback in empirical software engineering by following an experience-based line of reasoning by argument. Based on the identified key concepts, we design and execute a small proof of concept with a company, to demonstrate potential benefits of the approach. Results: In our example we observed that a simple double feedback mechanism notably increased the precision of the data analysis and improved the quality of the knowledge gathered. Conclusion: Our results serve as a basis to foster discus- sion and collaboration within the research community for a development of the idea

Minimum Viable Product in Information Systems Development Context: Systematic Mapping Study

Minimum Viable Product (MVP), initially introduced for startups, permits organizations to test the market demand for a product without investing a substantial amount of resources. Due to this nature of minimizing the risks and costs in the product development, not only startups in the information system development (ISD) context but also established organizations have started to adapt MVP in product development processes. Therefore, it is critical to understand how the notions of MVP can be employed in the ISD context. This study aims to identify common characteristics of MVP in the ISD context to support ISD organizations to define a better MVP for their product development processes. A systematic mapping study was performed by defining research questions, conducting a literature search, and defining selection criteria. Finally, the study presents the most used MVP characteristics in the ISD context and suggests a better combination of characteristics together with MVP\u27s original definition

Fast feedback cycles in empirical software engineering research

Background/Context: Gathering empirical knowledge is a time consuming task and the results from empirical studies often are soon outdated by new technological solutions. As a result, the impact of empirical results on software engineering practice is often not guaranteed. Objective/Aim: In this paper, we summarize the ongoing discussion on "Empirical Software Engineering 2.0" as a way to improve the impact of empirical results on industrial practices. We propose a way to combine data mining and analysis with domain knowledge to enable fast feedback cycles in empirical software engineering research. Method: We identify the key concepts on gathering fast feedback in empirical software engineering by following an experience-based line of reasoning by argument. Based on the identified key concepts, we design and execute a small proof of concept with a company to demonstrate potential benefits of the approach. Results: In our example, we observed that a simple double feedback mechanism notably increased the precision of the data analysis and improved the quality of the knowledge gathered. Conclusion: Our results serve as a basis to foster discussion and collaboration within the research community for a development of the idea

When Teams Go Crazy:An Environment to Experience Group Dynamics in Software Project Management Courses

Software development consists to a large extend of humanbased processes with continuously increasing demands regarding interdisciplinary team work. Understanding the dynamics of software teams can be seen as highly important to successful project execution. Hence, for future project managers, knowledge about non-technical processes in teams is significant. In this paper, we present a course unit that provides an environment in which students can learn and experience the impact of group dynamics on project performance and quality. The course unit uses the Tuckman model as theoretical framework, and borrows from controlled experiments to organize and implement its practical parts in which students then experience the effects of, e.g., time pressure, resource bottlenecks, staff turnover, loss of key personnel, and other stress factors. We provide a detailed design of the course unit to allow for implementation in further software project management courses. Furthermore, we provide experiences obtained from two instances of this unit conducted in Munich and Karlskrona with 36 graduate students. We observed students building awareness of stress factors and developing counter measures to reduce impact of those factors. Moreover, students experienced what problems occur when teams work under stress and how to form a performing team despite exceptional situations

Lean Commercialization: A New Framework for Commercializing High Technologies

Commercializing high technologies is expensive, tedious, and resource intensive. Meanwhile, there is a need for quick diffusion of innovations due to economic pressures for companies and research institutes. Therefore, this article proposes a new framework: lean commercialization. The framework represents a transformation of new technology and knowledge to products and services through the application of the lean/agile methodology. This methodology focuses on how resources can be minimized during the development, manufacturing, and marketing of new products and services, while still being accepted by customers. The lean commercialization framework was developed from a case study of high-technology companies and by interviewing commercialization experts. This article contributes to the theory and practice of commercialization of high technologies and provides a procedure for the practical application of the lean commercialization framework.</p

Lean Commercialization: A New Framework for Commercializing High Technologies

Commercializing high technologies is expensive, tedious, and resource intensive. Meanwhile, there is a need for quick diffusion of innovations due to economic pressures for companies and research institutes. Therefore, this article proposes a new framework: lean commercialization. The framework represents a transformation of new technology and knowledge to products and services through the application of the lean/agile methodology. This methodology focuses on how resources can be minimized during the development, manufacturing, and marketing of new products and services, while still being accepted by customers. The lean commercialization framework was developed from a case study of high-technology companies and by interviewing commercialization experts. This article contributes to the theory and practice of commercialization of high technologies and provides a procedure for the practical application of the lean commercialization framework