Business intelligence in performance management of agile programs

Abstract. This thesis was conducted for a case company with the primary objective of designing a business intelligence dashboard to be used in the management of agile programs. The aim is to increase the knowledge within the topic and to solve problems that the case company has with the lack of coherent and modern data-driven performance management practices. One of the paramount objectives of this thesis is to reduce the time consumed for manual performance reporting activities and therefore improve the productivity and efficiency within the program management processes and practices. Design science is used as the primary research method in this study. However, the existing literature is also reviewed to explore what has already been studied within the topic and to identify the best practices to be exploited in designing the dashboard. The current state analysis of the case company is conducted and requirements for the dashboard are identified via a survey and interviews. Based on empirical research, two business intelligence dashboards are designed to cover the identified use cases for the performance management of agile programs. This thesis contributes to program management and business intelligence research. Especially, agile program management is discussed at a rather practical level and a set of performance metrics to be used in it is proposed. The use of business intelligence is demonstrated through performance management methods. The results of this study can also be used for further research purposes. Therefore, this study makes clear scientific contributions in addition to the evident practical implications.Tiivistelmä. Tämän opinnäytetyön tavoitteena on suunnitella kohdeyritykselle business intelligence-raportointinäkymät hyödynnettäväksi ketterien ohjelmien johtamisessa. Työssä pyritään tarjoamaan ratkaisu kohdeyrityksen ongelmiin ja parantamaan johdonmukaisuutta nykypäiväisten datalähtöisten suorituskyvyn johtamiskäytäntöjen kautta. Yksi tämän opinnäytetyön keskeisimmistä tavoitteista on saada vähennettyä manuaalisiin raportointitoimenpiteisiin kuluvaa aikaa ja siten parantaa ohjelmajohtamisprosessien ja -käytäntöjen tehokkuutta ja tuottavuutta. Pääasiallisena tutkimusmenetelmänä työssä käytetään Design Science -menetelmää. Aikaisempia tutkimuksia käydään läpi osana kirjallisuuskatsausta, jotta saadaan kartoitettua, mitä aiheen ympärillä on jo aikaisemmin tutkittu. Aikaisempia tutkimustuloksia hyödynnetään myös hyvien käytäntöjen selvittämisessä raportointinäkymän suunnitteluprosessille. Kohdeyrityksen nykytilaa ja sen osoittamia vaatimuksia analysoidaan kyselyn ja haastattelujen kautta. Perustuen empiiriseen tutkimukseen kaksi raportointinäkymää päätettiin suunnitella kattamaan tunnistetut käyttökohteet suorituskyvyn johtamiselle ketterissä ohjelmissa. Tämä opinnäytetyö edistää aikaisempaa tutkimusta ohjelmajohtamisen ja business intelligencen alalla. Erityisesti tässä työssä käsitellään ketterää ohjelmajohtamista käytännön tasolla ja ehdotetaan suorituskyvyn mittareita siinä hyödynnettäväksi. Business intelligenceä havainnollistetaan erityisesti suorituskyvyn johtamismenetelmien kautta. Työn tuloksia voidaan myös hyödyntää jatkotutkimuksessa, joten työllä on myös selkeää tieteellistä kontribuutiota ilmeisten käytännön johtopäätösten lisäksi

Container deployment strategy for edge networking

Conference code: 156753 Cited By :2 Export Date: 1 February 2021 References: AlertManager, , https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/alertmanager/, Accessed: 2019-01-30; Docker Swarm Mode Overview, , https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/, Accessed: 2019-01-30; Google cAdvisor, , https://github.com/google/cadvisor, Accessed: 2019-01-30; Prometheus - Monitoring System & Time Series Database, , https://prometheus.io, Accessed: 2019-01-30; The Kubernetes Scheduler, , https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/command-line-tools-reference/kube-scheduler/, Accessed: 2019-01-30; (2018) Ericsson Mobility Report, , https://www.ericsson.com/assets/local/mobility-report/documents/2018/ericsson-mobilityreport-june-2018.pdf, Technical Report; Balan, R., Flinn, J., Satyanarayanan, M., Sinnamohideen, S., Yang, H.-I., The case for cyber foraging (2002) Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on ACM SIGOPS European Workshop (EW 10), pp. 87-92. , https://doi.org/10.1145/1133373.1133390, ACM, New York, NY, USA; Gordon, M.S., Anoushe Jamshidi, D., Mahlke, S., Mao, Z.M., Chen, X., CoMET: Code offload by migrating execution transparently (2012) Proceedings of the 10th USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI’12), pp. 93-106. , http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2387880.2387890, USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA; Habak, K., Ammar, M., Harras, K.A., Zegura, E., Femto clouds: Leveraging mobile devices to provide cloud service at the edge (2015) 2015 IEEE 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing, pp. 9-16. , https://doi.org/10.1109/CLOUD.2015.12; Hindman, B., Konwinski, A., Zaharia, M., Ghodsi, A., Joseph, A.D., Katz, R., Shenker, S., Stoica, I., Mesos: A Platform for Fine-grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center (2011) Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI’11), pp. 295-308. , http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1972457.1972488, USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA; Pahl, C., Lee, B., Containers and clusters for edge cloud architectures – A technology review (2015) 2015 3rd International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud, pp. 379-386. , https://doi.org/10.1109/FiCloud.2015.35; Roughan, M., Simplifying the synthesis of internet traffic matrices (2005) SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., 35 (5), pp. 93-96. , https://doi.org/10.1145/1096536.1096551, Oct. 2005; Satyanarayanan, M., Bahl, P., Caceres, R., Davies, N., The case for VM-based cloudlets in mobile computing (2009) IEEE Pervasive Computing, 8 (4), pp. 14-23. , https://doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2009.82, Oct 2009; Saurez, E., Hong, K., Lillethun, D., Ramachandran, U., Ottenwälder, B., Incremental Deployment and Migration of Geo-distributed Situation Awareness Applications in the Fog (2016) Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-Based Systems (DEBS’16), pp. 258-269. , https://doi.org/10.1145/2933267.2933317, ACM, New York, NY, USA; Shi, W., Cao, J., Zhang, Q., Li, Y., Xu, L., Edge computing: Vision and challenges (2016) IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 3 (5), pp. 637-646. , https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2016.2579198, Oct 2016; Wu, C.-P., Suresh, M.A., Silva, D.D., Container lifecycle management for edge nodes: Poster (2017) Proceedings of the Second ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC’17), p. 2; Yi, S., Hao, Z., Qin, Z., Li, Q., Fog computing: Platform and applications (2015) 2015 Third IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Web Systems and Technologies (HotWeb), pp. 73-78Edge computing paradigm has been proposed to support latency-sensitive applications such as Augmented Reality (AR)/ Virtual Reality(VR) and online gaming, by placing computing resources close to where they are most demanded, at the edge of the network. Many solutions have proposed to deploy virtual resources as close as possible to the consumers using virtual machines and containers. However, the most popular container orchestration tools, e.g., Docker Swarm and Kubernetes, do not take into account the locality aspect during deployment, resulting in poor location choices at the edge of the network. In this paper, we propose an edge deployment strategy to tackle the lack of locality awareness of the container orchestrator. In this strategy, the orchestrator collects information about latency and the real-time resource consumption from the current container deployments, providing a bird’s-eye view of the most demanded locations and the best places for deployment to cover the largest number of clients. We evaluated the proposed model using 16 AWS regions across the globe and compared to the standard deployment strategies. The experimental results show our edge strategy reduces the average latency between serving container to the clients by up to 4 times compared to the standard deployment algorithms. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.Peer reviewe

Ketterien projektinhallintamenetelmien vaikutus projektin menestykseen

Tiivistelmä. Projektien keskeinen tavoite on menestys. Hyvin iso osa yritystoiminnasta on projektimuotoista. Menestys on niin projektinhallinnan kuin koko yritystoiminnan keskeinen pyrkimys. Menestyksen saavuttamiseksi on tärkeää määrittää, mitkä ovat projektin tavoitteet ja menestyskriteerit. Tässä työssä esitellään menetelmiä projektin suorituskyvyn mittaamiseksi ja niitä hyödynnetään ketterien projektinhallintamenetelmien menestyksen arvioinnissa. Tämän työn tarkoituksena on tutkia ketterien projektinhallintamenetelmien vaikutuksia projektin menestykseen. Erityisesti työssä selvitetään projektin kriittisiä menestystekijöitä ja menestyskriteereitä. Työssä myös esitellään ja arvioidaan tilanteita, mihin ketterät menetelmät soveltuvat parhaiten. Tutkimuskysymykset tässä työssä ovat: — Miten ketterät menetelmät vaikuttavat projektin menestykseen? — Minkälaisiin tilanteisiin ketterät menetelmät soveltuvat? — Mitkä ketterät ominaisuudet parantavat menestystä? Tutkimusmenetelmänä työssä käytetään pääsääntöisesti kirjallisuuskatsausta. Tehtyjen tutkimusten ja olemassa olevaan kirjallisuuteen pohjautuen arvioidaan ketteriä menetelmiä projektissa hyödyntäneiden menestystä ja menestykseen johtavia tekijöitä. Menestykseen johtavien tekijöiden pohjalta muodostetaan malli, joka kuvaa mitkä ketteryyden periaatteista ovat tärkeimpiä, ja miten niitä voidaan hyödyntää osana perinteistä projektinhallintaa. Ketterillä menetelmillä on havaittu selkeä vaikutus menestykseen erityisesti ohjelmistoprojekteissa ja ainutlaatuisissa projekteissa, kuten uuden tuotteen kehityksessä. Projektin ympäristön tulee siis sisältää epävakautta tai projektin tulee olla tyyliltään ainutlaatuinen. Suurin hyöty ketterillä menetelmillä saadaan asiakasvaatimusten huomioimisen osalta. Ketterät projektinhallintamenetelmät painottavat jatkuvaa kehitystä ja korostavat asiakkaan roolia. Ketterälle projektitiimille on tyypillistä sen pieni koko, tiimijäsenten ammattitaito ja kokemus. Tämän työn tuloksia voidaan käyttää hyödyksi projektinhallintamenetelmän valinnassa ja arvioinnissa. Tuloksia ei kuitenkaan voi yleistää jokaiseen tapaukseen, sillä tutkimus tehtiin pääsääntöisesti ohjelmistokehityksen kontekstiin. Tulokset ovat siis suuntaa antavia.Impact of agile project management methods on project success. Abstract. Success is a common goal for projects. A significant part of the activities in organizations are project-based. Success is a common ambition both in project management and in organizations in general. Regarding project’s success it is also necessary to determine the key success factors for project management. In this thesis methods for measuring project’s success are presented. These measures are used to evaluate the success of agile project management methods. The aim in this thesis is to study the impacts agile methods have on project success. Especially this study aims to find critical success factors regarding projects success and to find situations in which the agile methods are particularly useful. The research questions for this study are following: — What kind of impacts do agile methods have on project success? — In what kind of situations are agile methods effective? — What agile characteristics improve project success? Research method used in this thesis is literary survey. Based on existing researches and literature the goal is to measure the impacts of agile methods. The factors resulting to successful projects are identified. Based on them the goal is to form a model of the characteristics leading to successful projects. The single characteristics identified can be included as part of traditional methodology to improve project performance. Agile methods are perceived to have a positive impact on project success especially in the field of software development and other unique type of projects. The project environment must contain uncertainty to get the most out of agile methodology. The most significant benefit gained with agile methods is responding to customer requirements. Agile methods emphasize continuous improvement and the role of a customer. Typical agile team is relatively small, professional and experienced. The results of this thesis can be used to choose and evaluate methods for project management. These results can’t be generalized in every situation as the research was done mainly in software development context. The results are therefore suggestive

Pro-Diluvian: Understanding scoped-flooding for content discovery in information-centric networking

Scoped-flooding is a technique for content discovery in a broad networking context. This paper investigates the ef-fects of scoped-flooding on various topologies in information-centric networking. Using the proposed ring model, we show that flooding can be constrained within a very small neigh-bourhood to achieve most of the gains which come from areas where the growth rate is relatively low, i.e., the net-work edge. We also study two flooding strategies and com-pare their behaviours. Given that caching schemes favour more popular items in competition for cache space, popu-lar items are expected to be stored in diverse parts of the network compared to the less popular items. We propose to exploit the resulting divergence in availability along with the routers ’ topological properties to fine tune the flooding radius. Our results shed light on designing ecient con-tent discovery mechanism for future information-centric net-works

Efficient management of virtualized information-centric networks

The Internet has rapidly evolved from a network, connecting a couple of dozens of computers, to a network containing billions of devices. Furthermore, the current Internet is mostly used to deliver complex services with increasingly stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. However, the underlying network model has remained the same, making the Internet not well suited to optimally support the current user trends and services. Currently, a lot of effort is being made in the area of network virtualization and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) to support the evolution towards the QoS constraint distribution of large amounts of information. Even though both directions offer a lot of opportunities, multiple important challenges have to be faced when managing the placement of content inside the network and guaranteeing delivery efficiency. These challenges are further increased when a combination of both trends is considered. This paper gives an overview of these challenges and how this PhD will deal with the mutual influences of network virtualization and ICN in an efficient way

Distributed Scheduling of Recording Tasks with Interconnected Servers

We consider a system with multiple interconnected video servers storing TV programs that are received through satellite antennas. Users, equipped with set-top boxes, submit requests for TV programs, to each of which they assign a utility value according to their preferences. We develop a distributed scheduling algorithm that selects the programs to be recorded and the servers to store them, so that a high total utility is generated to the users' population. Our scheduling algorithm is based on the programs' broadcasting information, the users' preferences, the constraints regarding the capabilities of simultaneous recordings and storage, and the system's topology. In fact, servers belonging to the same cluster co-operate in order to attain increased e#ciency by exchanging content through streaming or replication. The e#cient performance of our scheduling algorithm is shown by means of experiments. The algorithm constitutes a practically applicable solution, already implemented and integrated in the testbed of the IST project UP-TV

An Analysis of Private School Closings

We add to the small literature on private school supply by exploring exits of K-12 private schools. We find that the closure of private schools is not an infrequent event, and use national survey data from the National Center for Education Statistics to study closures of private schools. We assume that the probability of an exit is a function of excess supply of private schools over the demand, as well as the school's characteristics such as age, size, and religious affiliation. Our empirical results generally support the implications of the model. Working Paper 07-0