Continuous software engineering: A roadmap and agenda

The Lean Startup: How today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses

Three models of strategy that are implicit in the literature are described--linear, adaptive, and interpretive. Their similarity to Boulding's (1956) hierarchical levels of system complexity is not...

Three Models of Strategy.

Workshop Lean Start-up: short lecture to graduation own business group, held on 28-10-2015.

The lean startup

Twitter has become a major instrument for the rapid dissemination and subsequent debate of news stories, and comprehensive methodologies for systematic research into news discussion on Twitter are beginning to emerge. This paper outlines innovative approaches for large-scale quantitative research into how Twitter is used to discuss and cover the news, focusing especially on #hashtags: brief identifiers which mark a tweet as taking part in an established discussion.

Researching news discussion on Twitter : New methodologies

A swift execution from idea to market has become a key competitive advantage for software companies to enable them to survive and grow in turbulent business environments. To combat this challenge, companies are using hackathons. A hackathon is a highly engaging, continuous event in which people in small groups produce working software prototypes in a limited amount of time. F-Secure, a software product company, views hackathons as a possible solution to the fundamental business problem of how to make revenue from an idea, spanning the phases from creating the idea to producing a software prototype. However, hackathons pose the challenge of how to transform those promising prototypes into finalized products that create revenue and real business value.

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What are Hackathons for

An increasing number of organizations are interested in binding requirements and testing more closely together. Based on a series of practitioner interviews conducted in five Finnish organizations, this paper presents a set of good practices that can be applied to create a stronger link between requirements engineering and testing. These practices include early tester participation particularly in requirements reviews, setting up traceability policies, taking feature requests from testers into account, and linking testing personnel with requirement owners. Due to reported hardships in implementing complete test traceability to requirements, communication links between testers and requirement owners are suggested in order to overcome the deficiencies of document links.

Linking Requirements and Testing in Practice

The success of software ecosystems highly depends on the variety and quality of end-user applications. Therefore, attracting third-party developers and facilitating application development is crucial. Platform boundary resources enable third-party developers to create the applications. Thus, the platform boundary resources expose and extend the platform architecture. We conducted an industrial case study on third-party developer experience, particularly on the role of platform boundary resources in exposing the platform architecture and facilitating development. The studied ecosystem is centered on managing end-users' content across devices, the ecosystem was in its pre-commercial phase. The results identify the platform boundary resources in the case study and propose a model for classifying the resources. Further, designing the platform boundary resources is not only about opening up the platform architecture. Instead, the platform boundary resources need to account for a rich variety of applications, or at least not limit too much the creativity of third-party developers, while still aiming at the ease of development. We conclude that the platform boundary resources need to be created for the third-party developers, rather than from the platform architecture.

The Role of Platform Boundary Resources in Software Ecosystems: A Case Study

A hackathon (hacking marathon) is an event to innovate and develop prototypes, typically lasting at most a few days. Despite several innovations having been reported resulting from hackathons and the increasing popularity of hackathons, results about, organizing of, and experiences regarding hackathons have been scarcely reported. We studied a hackathon as a means to assess a device-centric cloud ecosystem in industrial settings. We provide a descriptive account of a three-days hackathon. The experience was that the hackathon was realistic as well as an efficient and effective assessment of the requirements and design of the ecosystem, providing guidance for future development. We also summarize the lessons learned about successfully organizing a hackathon. The results also highlight encouraging experience about the hackathon among the participants in terms of the social benefits, such as collaboration, inspiration, and work motivation, resulting in repeating hackathons for various purposes in the near future. In general, the results indicate a hackathon as a promising new approach in software engineering, where speed of development is becoming essential.

Industrial Experiences of Organizing a Hackathon to Assess a Device-centric Cloud Ecosystem

A strong link between strategy and product development is important, since companies need to select requirements for forthcoming releases. However, in practice, connecting requirements engineering (RE) and business planning is far from trivial. This paper describes the lessons learned from four software product companies that have recognized the need for more business-oriented long-term planning. The study was conducted using the action research approach. We identified five practices that seem to strengthen the link between business decisions and RE. These are (1) explicating the planning levels and time horizons; (2) separating the planning of products’ business goals from RD (3) planning open-endedly with a pre-defined rhythm; (4) emphasizing whole-product thinking; and (5) making solution planning visible. To support whole-product thinking and solution planning, we suggest that companies create solution concepts. The purpose of the solution concept is to provide a big picture of the solution and guide RE activities.

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Marko Komssi

Papers

What are Hackathons for

Linking Requirements and Testing in Practice

The Role of Platform Boundary Resources in Software Ecosystems: A Case Study

Industrial Experiences of Organizing a Hackathon to Assess a Device-centric Cloud Ecosystem

Linking business and requirements engineering: is solution planning a missing activity in software product companies?