Jukka Kääriäinen

Applying Application Lifecycle Management for the Development of Complex Systems: Experiences from the Automation Industry

In this paper we present an industrial study about the history of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) improvement in a case company. The study is part of broader research with the aim to improve global development in a company. The improvement of ALM started three years ago when the company decided to acquire a commercial ALM solution. Two SW teams developing different kinds of SW products started to pilot the solution and after various steps ended up with fairly different ALM solutions. This paper concludes the history and experiences of ALM improvement and discusses the reasons why two teams ended up with different solutions. The improvement of ALM solutions has been facilitated with the use of an ALM framework.

Improving requirements management in extreme programming with tool support - an improvement attempt that failed

While extreme programming (XP) relies on certain principles, it requires an extensive set of tools to enable an effective execution of its practices. In many companies, putting stories on the board may not be sufficient for managing rapidly changing requirements. The objective of This work is to report the results from a study where a requirement management tool - the Storymanager - was developed to meet the needs of a XP project team. The tool was used in a case project where a mobile application for real markets was produced. The tool was dropped by the team only after two releases. The reasons of the process improvement failure are addressed in This work. The principal results show that the tool was found to be too difficult to use and that it failed to provide as powerful a visual view as the paper-pen board method. The implications of these findings are addressed for both the practitioners and researchers in the field.

Challenges and industry practices for managing software variability in small and medium sized enterprises

Software variability is an ability to change (configure, customize, extend) software artefacts (e.g. code, product, domain requirements, models, design, documentation, test cases) for a specific context. Optimized variability management can lead a software company to 1) shorter development lead time, 2) improved customer and improved user satisfaction, 3) reduced complexity of product management (more variability, same

Extending Global Tool Integration Environment towards Lifecycle Management

) and 4) reduced costs (same variability, less

Patterns for Distributed Scrum — A Case Study

). However, it is not easy for software companies, especially small and medium size of enterprises to deal with variability. In this paper we present variability challenges and used practices collected from five SMEs. Our study indicates that increased product complexity can lead growing SMEs to the time-consuming decision-making. Many of the analyzed medium size of companies also expect improved tool support to help them to boost their productivity when managing increasingly complex products and increasing amount of variants In fact, in many of the analysed SMEs, a high level of automation in design, release management and testing are or become a key factor for market success By introducing the challenges and used practices related to variability the paper deepens understanding of this highly relevant but relatively under-researched phenomenon and contributes to the literature on software product line engineering.

Impact of Application Lifecycle Management — A Case Study

Development and verification of complex systems requires close collaboration between different disciplines and specialists operating in a global development environment with various tools and product data storage. Fluent integration of the tools and databases facilitate a productive development environment by enabling the user to easily launch tools and transfer information between the disconnected databases and tools. The concept of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) was established to indicate the coordination of activities and the management of artefacts during the software products lifecycle. This paper presents the analysis of an open source global tool integration environment called ToolChain, and proposes improvement ideas for it towards application lifecycle management. The demonstration of ToolChain and the collection of improvement proposals were carried out in the telecommunication industry. The analysis was made using the ALM framework and Global Software Development (GSD) patterns developed in previous studies in the automation industry.

Global Software Development Patterns for Project Management

System products need to be developed faster in a global development environment. More efficient project management becomes more important to meet strict time-to-market and quality constraints. The goal of this research is to study and find the best practices to distributed Scrum, which is an agile project management method. The paper describes the process of mining distributed Scrum organizational patterns. The experiences and improvement ideas of distributed Scrum have been collected from a global company operating in the automation industry. The results present issues that were found important when managing agile projects in a distributed environment. The results are further generalized in the form of an organizational pattern which makes it easier for other companies to reflect on and to apply the results to their own cases.

Challenges in Collaboration: Tool Chain Enables Transparency Beyond Partner Borders

Lifecycle management provides a generic frame of reference for systems and methods that are needed for managing all product related data during the product’s lifecycle. This paper reports experiences from a case study performed in the automation industry. The goal was to study the concept of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and gather and analyse first experiences when a company is moving towards distributed application lifecycle management. The results show that several benefits were gained when introducing an ALM solution in a case company. This research also produced a first version of an ALM framework that can be used to support practical ALM improvement efforts. In this case, the experiences show that lifecycle activity should manage artefacts produced in different stages in a project lifecycle and keep all activities in synchronised. The challenge resides in how to generate efficient company-specific implementations of ALM for complicated real-life situations.

Requirements management practices as patterns for distributed product management

Global software development with the agile or waterfall development process has been taken into use in many companies. GSD offers benefits but also new challenges without known, documented solutions. The goal of this research is to present current best practices for GSD in the form of process patterns for project management, evaluated by using a scenario-based assessment method. The best practices have been collected from a large company operating in process automation. It is expected that the resulting pattern language helps other companies to improve their GSD processes by incorporating the patterns in the processes.

Building a Concept Solution for Upgrade Planning in the Automation Industry

This paper shows how the tool chain supports efficient use of resources and transparency through partners in collaborative software development. Tool chain also improves the requirements tracing during the software development lifecycle.