Scaling agile on large enterprise level – systematic bundling and application of state of the art approaches for lasting agile transitions

International audienceOrganizations are looking for ways of establishing agile and lean process for delivery. Many approaches exist in the form of frameworks, methods and tools to setup an individual composition for a best fit. The challenge is that large organizations are heterogeneous and diverse, and hence there is no "one size fits all" approach. To facilitate a systematic implementation of agile and lean, this article proposes a transition kit based on abstraction. This kit scouts and bundles state of the art methods and tools from the agile and lean community to align them with governance and compliance aspects of the specific enterprise. Coaching of the application of the transition kit ensures an adequate instantiation. The instantiation handles business domain specific aspects and standards. A coaching governance ensures continuous improvement. An example of the systematic application of the transition approach as well as its scaling is demonstrated through its application in the Volkswagen Group IT

Market Offer For IKOR GMBH: Development of a business analysis to assess the usefulness of the Scaled Agile Framework for insurance companies

Internship Report presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementIt has been known for years that agile methods have a major role to play in project management. Increasingly, frameworks for agile scaling are becoming more popular and widespread. The Scaled Agile Framework is one of them. It enjoys great popularity in many industries. Therefore, IKOR has considered that a market offer is needed that exactly fulfils this need for its customers. These are mainly insurance customers, who are still a few years behind the digital transformation compared to other industries. In order to create a solution for this, IKOR decided that a market offer was needed that assessed whether SAFe was a useful framework for the insurance company to adopt and provided an assessment of how far along the insurance company was in adopting SAFe. This internship report was prepared to fulfil and document this task. During the development of the market offer, SAFe, business analysis, and the implementation of workshops were dealt with from a theoretical as well as a practical point of view. The result was a business analysis in form of a questionnaire, a workshop concept for conducting the workshop with the client and a recommendation made to the client on the current status of his insurance. After the exemplary implementation, the procedure and the results were evaluated and classified by experts. They gave additional advice on how to use and expand the market offer

Kirjallisuuskatsaus testiautomaatiomalleista ketterässä ohjelmistotestauksessa

Test automation is considered to be a crucial part of a modern Agile development team. Agile software testing methods and development practices, such as Test Driven Development (TDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD), continuously assure software quality during development time, from project start to finish. Agile software development methods require Agile testing practices for its implementation. Software quality is built-in and delivering functional and stable software continuously is a key business capability. Automated system and acceptance tests are considered as a routine part of the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline. The objective of the research was to study, what test automation models, Agile practices and tools are found in Agile test automation literature and what kind of generic Agile test automation model can be synthesized from this literature. The objective was completed by conducting a systematic literature review of test automation models. The initial search included fifty scientific articles, from which ten models were selected for further analysis. The selected articles and their models were modelled using prescriptive modelling. The tools and Agile practices mentioned in the articles were recorded and categorized. Each model was also categorized according to its domain of application. Using the collected data, a synthesized generic model for Agile test automation model was created. Test automation models proved difficult to evaluate as the models were vastly different from each other in their description, depth of detail, utility, environment, scope and domain of application. A generic Agile test automation model would be characterized with agent, activity, artefact and event elements. It would have a functional information perspective and would be formally presented in text and graphic form. Continuous Integration was identified as the most popular Agile development method and Scrum as the most popular Agile management practice. Continuous Integration was also identified as the most popular tool category

Exploring Software Testing Strategies Used on Software Applications in the Government

Developing a defect-free software application is a challenging task. Despite many years of experience, the intense development of reliable software remains a challenge. For this reason, software defects identified at the end of the testing phase are more expensive than those detected sooner. The purpose of this multiple case study is to explore the testing strategies software developers use to ensure the reliability of software applications in the government contracting industry. The target population consisted of software developers from 3 government contracting organizations located along the East Coast region of the United States. Lehman’s laws of software evolution was the conceptual framework. The data collection process included semistructured interviews with software developers (n = 10), including a review of organizational documents (n = 77). Thematic analysis was used to identify patterns and codes from the interviews. Member checking activities were triangulated with organizational documents to produce 4 major themes: (a) communication and collaboration with all stakeholders, (b) development of well-defined requirements, (c) focus on thorough documentation, and (d) focus on automation testing. The results of this study may contribute to information about testing strategies that may help organizations improve or enhance their testing practices. The results of this study may serve as a foundation for positive social change by potentially improving citizens’ experience with government software applications as a result of potential improvement in software testing practice