Customized agile development process for embedded software development

Agile software development has grown in popularity starting from the agile manifesto declared in 2001. However there is a strong belief that the agile methods are not suitable for embedded, critical or real-time software development, even though multiple studies and cases show differently. This thesis will present a custom agile process that can be used in embedded software development. The reasons for presumed unfitness of agile methods in embedded software development have mainly based on the feeling of these methods providing no real control, no strict discipline and less rigor engineering practices. One starting point is to provide a light process with disciplined approach to the embedded software development. Agile software development has gained popularity due to the fact that there are still big issues in software development as a whole. Projects fail due to schedule slips, budget surpassing or failing to meet the business needs. This does not change when talking about embedded software development. These issues are still valid, with multiple new ones rising from the quite complex and hard domain the embedded software developers work in. These issues are another starting point for this thesis. The thesis is based heavily on Feature Driven Development, a software development methodology that can be seen as a runner up to the most popular agile methodologies. The FDD as such is quite process oriented and is lacking few practices considered commonly as extremely important in agile development methodologies. In order for FDD to gain acceptance in the software development community it needs to be modified and enhanced. This thesis presents an improved custom agile process that can be used in embedded software development projects with size varying from 10 to 500 persons. This process is based on Feature Driven Development and by suitable parts to Extreme Programming, Scrum and Agile Modeling. Finally this thesis will present how the new process responds to the common issues in the embedded software development. The process of creating the new process is evaluated at the retrospective and guidelines for such process creation work are introduced. These emphasize the agility also in the process development through early and frequent deliveries and the team work needed to create suitable process.Siirretty Doriast

Stakeholder involvement in software system development – Insights into the influence of product-service ratio

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2015.05.006Software systems have a growing importance in how services are delivered in the present-day. New methods and technologies are constantly introduced for realizing novel services in a wide range of industries. In this study, stakeholder involvement in the development of financial service software system is examined, as software has been integral to the delivery of financial services. Two projects are selected for their varying degrees of product and service content. Both teams used an adapted stakeholder identification framework developed for the healthcare industry to identify stakeholders and their involvement need in the development projects. The suitability of this framework for financial service software development, and the differences in stakeholders for the development of new software systems of dissimilar product-service mix are discussed in the paper. Four insights into the influence of product-service ratio in stakeholder involvement are gained in the perspectives of product quality, relationship management, product support by customer, and service delivery process.The second author thanks Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation and Nokia Foundation (201410491) for financially supporting his dissertation work on innovations in agile software development context

Report from the PhD Symposium at XP2013 – An Adaptive Experiment in Feedback

In this paper, we describe the PhD Symposium organized as a part of the 14th International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP2013). The Symposium was run with an experimental adaptive structure and was divided into two workshops distributed across the conference as well as individual sessions during the conference. The activities of the second workshop were adapted based on the learning needs of the attendees. In this report we describe the structure of the two scheduled workshops, the activities conducted both during and between them, and evaluate the outcome of this Symposium format.</span