Challenges and Means for the Front End Activities of Software Development

The front end of innovation is regarded as one of the most important steps in building new software products or services, and the most significant benefits in software development can be achieved through improvements in the front end activities. Problems in the front end phase have an impact on customer dissatisfaction with delivered software, and on the effectiveness of the entire software development process. When these processes are improved, the likelihood of delivering high quality software and business success increases. This thesis highlights the challenges and problems related to the early phases of software development, and provides new methods and tools for improving performance in the front end activities of software development. The theoretical framework of this study comprises two fields of research. The first section belongs to the field of innovation management, and especially to the management of the early phases of the innovation process, i.e. the front end of innovation. The second section of the framework is closely linked to the processes of software engineering, especially to the early phases of the software development process, i.e. the practice of requirements engineering. Thus, this study extends the theoretical knowledge and discloses the differences and similarities in these two fields of research. In addition, this study opens up a new strand for academic discussion by connecting these research directions. Several qualitative business research methodologies have been utilized in the individual publications to solve the research questions. The theoretical and managerial contribution of the study can be divided into three areas: 1) processes and concepts, 2) challenges and development needs, and 3) means and methods for the front end activities of software development. First, the study discloses the difference and similarities between the concepts of the front end of innovation and requirements engineering, and proposes a new framework for managing the front end of the software innovation process, bringing business and innovation perspectives into software development. Furthermore, the study discloses managerial perceptions of the similarities and differences in the concept of the front end of innovation between the software industry and the traditional industrial sector. Second, the study highlights the challenges and development needs in the front end phase of software development, especially challenges in communication, such as linguistic problems, ineffective communication channels, a communication gap between users/customers and software developers, and participation of multiple persons in software development. Third, the study proposes new group methods for improving the front end activities of software development, especially customer need assessment, and the elicitation of software requirements.

Improving and User Interface to E-Procurement Software Used in Asset Accounting and Investigating Effects to Efficiency

This diploma thesis has been done to international organization which takes care from the accounting actions of two major companies. In this organization are used three different purchasing tools which are used when new asset master data is wanted to input to SAP R/3- system. The aim of this thesis is to find out how much changing the user interface of one of these three e-procurement programs will affect to overall efficiency in asset accounting. As an addition will be introduced project framework which can be used in future projects and which help to avoid certain steps in the development process. At the moment data needs to be inputted manually with many useless mouse clicks and data needs to be searched from many various resources which slow down the process. Other organization has better tools at the moment than the myOrders system which is under investigation Research was started by exploring the main improvement areas. After this possible defects were traced. Suggested improvements were thought by exploring literature which has been written from usability design and research. Meanwhile also directional calculations from the benefits of the project were done alongside with the analysis of the possible risks and threats. After this NSN IT approved the changes which they thought was acceptable. The next step was to program them into tool and test them before releasing to production environment. The calculations were made also from implemented improvements and compared them to planned ones From whole project was made a framework which can be utilized also to other similar projects. The complete calculation was not possible because of time schedule of the project. Important observation in the project was that efficiency is not improved not only by changing the GUI but also improving processes without any programming. Feedback from end user should be also listened more in development process. End-user is after all the one who knows the best how the program should look like.

Evaluating the success of software development projects in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus

The size and complexity of projects in the software development are growing very fast. At the same time, the proportion of successful projects is still quite low according to the previous research. Although almost every project's team knows main areas of responsibility which would help to finish project on time and on budget, this knowledge is rarely used in practice. So it is important to evaluate the success of existing software development projects and to suggest a method for evaluating success chances which can be used in the software development projects. The main aim of this study is to evaluate the success of projects in the selected geographical region (Russia-Ukraine-Belarus). The second aim is to compare existing models of success prediction and to determine their strengths and weaknesses. Research was done as an empirical study. A survey with structured forms and theme-based interviews were used as the data collection methods. The information gathering was done in two stages. At the first stage, project manager or someone with similar responsibilities answered the questions over Internet. At the second stage, the participant was interviewed; his or her answers were discussed and refined. It made possible to get accurate information about each project and to avoid errors. It was found out that there are many problems in the software development projects. These problems are widely known and were discussed in literature many times. The research showed that most of the projects have problems with schedule, requirements, architecture, quality, and budget. Comparison of two models of success prediction presented that The Standish Group overestimates problems in project. At the same time, McConnell's model can help to identify problems in time and avoid troubles in future. A framework for evaluating success chances in distributed projects was suggested. The framework is similar to The Standish Group model but it was customized for distributed projects.

A Survey and Classification of Software Testing Tools

Software testing is one of the essential parts in software engineering process. The objective of the study was to describe software testing tools and the corresponding use. The thesis contains examples of software testing tools usage. The study was conducted as a literature study, with focus on current software testing practices and quality assurance standards. In the paper a tool classifier was employed, and testing tools presented in study were classified according to it. We found that it is difficult to distinguish current available tools by certain testing activities as many of them contain functionality that exceeds scopes of a single testing type.

Platform as a Service - new opportunities for software development companies

Today cloud computing is the next stage in development information-oriented society in field of information technologies. Great attention is paid to cloud computing in general, but the lack of scientific consideration to components brings to the problem, that not all aspects are well examined. This thesis is an attempt to consider Platform as a Service (a technology of providing development environment through the Internet) from divergent angles. Technical characteristics, costs, time, estimation of effectiveness, risks, strategies that can be applied, migration process, advantages and disadvantages and the future of the approach are examined to get the overall picture of cloud platforms. During the work literature study was used to examine Platform as a Service, characteristics of existent cloud platforms were explored and a model of a typical software development company was developed to create a scenario of migration to cloud technologies. The research showed that besides all virtues in reducing costs and time, cloud platforms have some significant obstacles in adoption. Privacy, security and insufficient legislation impede the concept to be widespread.

Utilizing social media in software documentation and knowledge management

This Master’s thesis studies the possibilities that social media tools can bring to help knowledge management in software development companies. It will introduce the most popular tools of social media and their usage possibilities in companies, not forgetting the possible downsides. One relevant aspect in this study is to investigate the possibilities of social media to help converting existing tacit knowledge into explicit. The purpose of the work is to create a proposal of social media utilization for a mid-sized software company, which has not utilized social media tools before. To be able to create the proposal, employees of the company are interviewed and a survey is executed to analyze the current situation. In addition a pilot project for trying out new social media tools is executed. The final result of this thesis introduces a tailored solution for the target company to start utilizing social media in its documentation and knowledge sharing processes. This new solution consists of multiple individual suggestions that are categorized and prioritized based on the significance and benefit that they bring to the company.

Software Licensing: Implementing Electronic Licensing in Medical Technology Company

The purpose of this thesis is to examine software licensing, how a software developer can benefit from it and to define specifications for licensing system of software based medical technology product. The thesis has been divided into theoretical and empirical parts. In the theoretical part the concept of software licensing and different aspects that are connected to it are examined with a help of research material. On the ground of this research, in the empirical part, a licensing system for a medical software product called iCentral is designed. The empirical part is based on interviews, questionnaire and on authors own experience gained while working for the case-company.The thesis has great practical importance for the case-company by proposing both an ideal, and more importantly, practical implementation for a licensing system of a product. Thesis shows that electronic licensing is a viable option to sell medical technology products without a need to revise existing procedures or the enterprise resource system in the case company.

A proposal for a repertoire of software testing methods

Nowadays software testing and quality assurance have a great value in software development process. Software testing does not mean a concrete discipline, it is the process of validation and verification that starts from the idea of future product and finishes at the end of product’s maintenance. The importance of software testing methods and tools that can be applied on different testing phases is highly stressed in industry. The initial objectives for this thesis were to provide a sufficient literature review on different testing phases and for each of the phases define the method that can be effectively used for improving software’s quality. Software testing phases, chosen for study are: unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, system testing, acceptance testing and usability testing. The research showed that there are many software testing methods that can be applied at different phases and in the most of the cases the choice of the method should be done depending on software type and its specification. In the thesis the problem, concerned to each of the phases was identified; the method that can help in eliminating this problem was suggested and particularly described.

Structured software development with the IPIDDDT method - A lean method for small agile organizations

A software development process is a predetermined sequence of steps to create a piece of software. A software development process is used, so that an implementing organization could gain significant benefits. The benefits for software development companies, that can be attributed to software process improvement efforts, are improved predictability in the development effort and improved quality software products. The implementation, maintenance, and management of a software process as well as the software process improvement efforts are expensive. Especially the implementation phase is expensive with a best case scenario of a slow return on investment. Software processes are rare in very small software development companies because of the cost of implementation and an improbable return on investment. This study presents a new method to enable benefits that are usually related to software process improvement to small companies with a low cost. The study presents reasons for the development of the method, a description of the method, and an implementation process for the method, as well as a theoretical case study of a method implementation. The study's focus is on describing the method. The theoretical use case is used to illustrate the theory of the method and the implementation process of the method. The study ends with a few conclusions on the method and on the method's implementation process. The main conclusion is that the method requires further study as well as implementation experiments to asses the value of the method.

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.

New computer software for defining the three-dimensional geometry for a centrifu- gal compressor impeller

In this thesis, a computer software for defining the geometry for a centrifugal compressor impeller is designed and implemented. The project is done under the supervision of Laboratory of Fluid Dynamics in Lappeenranta University of Technology. This thesis is similar to the thesis written by Tomi Putus (2009) in which a centrifugal compressor impeller flow channel is researched and commonly used design practices are reviewed. Putus wrote a computer software which can be used to define impeller’s three-dimensional geometry based on the basic geometrical dimensions given by a preliminary design. The software designed in this thesis is almost similar but it uses a different programming language (C++) and a different way to define the shape of the impeller meridional projection.

Tutorials for MeVEA Simulation Software

The objective of the thesis was to create three tutorials for MeVEA Simulation Software to instruct the new users to the modeling methodology used in the MeVEA Simulation Software. MeVEA Simulation Software is a real-time simulation software based on multibody dynamics. The simulation software is designed to create simulation models of complete mechatronical system. The thesis begins with a more detail description of the MeVEA Simulation Software and its components. The thesis presents the three simulation models and written theory of the steps of model creation. The first tutorial introduces the basic features which are used in most simulation models. The basic features include bodies, constrains, forces, basic hydraulics and motors. The second tutorial introduces the power transmission components, tyres and user input definitions for the different components in power transmission systems. The third tutorial introduces the definitions of two different types of collisions and collision graphics used in MeVEA Simulation Software.

Applications of graph transformation in tools for domain-specific modeling languages

The use of domain-specific languages (DSLs) has been proposed as an approach to cost-e ectively develop families of software systems in a restricted application domain. Domain-specific languages in combination with the accumulated knowledge and experience of previous implementations, can in turn be used to generate new applications with unique sets of requirements. For this reason, DSLs are considered to be an important approach for software reuse. However, the toolset supporting a particular domain-specific language is also domain-specific and is per definition not reusable. Therefore, creating and maintaining a DSL requires additional resources that could be even larger than the savings associated with using them. As a solution, di erent tool frameworks have been proposed to simplify and reduce the cost of developments of DSLs. Developers of tool support for DSLs need to instantiate, customize or configure the framework for a particular DSL. There are di erent approaches for this. An approach is to use an application programming interface (API) and to extend the basic framework using an imperative programming language. An example of a tools which is based on this approach is Eclipse GEF. Another approach is to configure the framework using declarative languages that are independent of the underlying framework implementation. We believe this second approach can bring important benefits as this brings focus to specifying what should the tool be like instead of writing a program specifying how the tool achieves this functionality. In this thesis we explore this second approach. We use graph transformation as the basic approach to customize a domain-specific modeling (DSM) tool framework. The contributions of this thesis includes a comparison of di erent approaches for defining, representing and interchanging software modeling languages and models and a tool architecture for an open domain-specific modeling framework that e ciently integrates several model transformation components and visual editors. We also present several specific algorithms and tool components for DSM framework. These include an approach for graph query based on region operators and the star operator and an approach for reconciling models and diagrams after executing model transformation programs. We exemplify our approach with two case studies MICAS and EFCO. In these studies we show how our experimental modeling tool framework has been used to define tool environments for domain-specific languages.

Analysis of companies' software as a service adoption intention factors

The goal of this study is to develop managerial recommendations for international vendors and system integrators, which offer Software as a Service for enterprise information systems on the Russian market. Those recommendations can be used to develop marketing, sales, new product and service level agreement strategies. For those reasons factors affecting SaaS adoption were determined and their influence on intention to adoption was examined.

Intellectual capital management in international and Russian software companies

The importance of the company’s intellectual capital (IC) increased during the last decades due to knowledge-based economy development. Despite the clear understanding of the IC importance, researchers agree on the fact that many difficulties in management of intangibles still exist from the both theoretical and practical points of view. The goal of the study is to conduct a comparison of IC management approaches used in international and Russian software companies. To carry out a proper comparison and identify similarities and differences, software firms are explored from the point of view of IC, and then be compared in the context of international and Russian sectors. At the end of the study, current IC management findings in international and Russian software companies are presented, and comparison of IC management is done. It was investigated from the comparison that international and Russian software companies have similarities and few principal differences in several IC management areas. The comparison of IC management approaches between international and Russian software companies provide helpful information to both, researchers and practitioners.