This text provides a detailed approach to software quality improvement based on six years of successful quality management at Tokheim and participation in several EEC-funded projects. It provides all of the information that is required to set up a quality improvement programme.

Aligning an organization’s goals and strategies requires specifying their rationales and connections so that the links are explicit and allow for analytic reasoning about what is successful and where improvement is necessary. This book provides guidance on how to achieve this alignment, how to monitor the success of goals and strategies and use measurement to recognize potential failures, and how to close alignment gaps. It uses the GQM+Strategies approach, which provides concepts and actionable steps for creating the link between goals and strategies across an organization and allows for measurement-based decision-making. After outlining the general motivation for organizational alignment through measurement, the GQM+Strategies approach is described concisely, with a focus on the basic model that is created and the process for creating and using this model. The recommended steps of all six phases of the process are then described in detail with the help of a comprehensive application example. Finally, the industrial challenges addressed by the method and cases of its application in industry are presented, and the relations to other approaches, such as Balanced Scorecard, are described. The book concludes with supplementary material, such as checklists and guidelines, to support the application of the method. This book is aimed at organization leaders, managers, decision makers, and other professionals interested in aligning their organization’s goals and strategies and establishing an efficient strategic measurement program. It is also interesting for academic researchers looking for mechanisms to integrate their research results into organizational environments.

Big Agile leaders need an empirical, "high-trust" model that provides guidance for scaling and sustaining agility and capability throughout a modern technology organization. This book presents the Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—a "how-ability" model that provides agile leaders and teams with an operating system to build, evaluate, and sustain great agile habits and behaviors. The APH is an organizational operating system based on a set of interdependent, self-organizing circles, or holons, that reflect the empirical, object-oriented nature of agility. As more companies seek the benefits of Agile within and beyond IT, agile leaders need to build and sustain capability while scaling agility—no easy task—and they need to succeed without introducing unnecessary process and overhead. The APH is drawn from lessons learned while observing and assessing hundreds of agile companies and teams. It is not a process or a hierarchy, but a holarchy, a series of performance circles with embedded and interdependent holons that reflect the behaviors of high-performing agile organizations. Great Big Agile provides implementation guidance in the areas of leadership, values, teaming, visioning, governing, building, supporting, and engaging within an all-agile organization. What You’ll Learn Model the behaviors of a high-performance agile organizationBenefit from lessons learned by other organizations that have succeeded with Big AgileAssess your level of agility with the Agile Performance Holarchy Apply the APH model to your business Understand the APH performance circles, holons, objectives, and actions Obtain certification for your company, organization, or agency Who This Book Is For Professionals leading, or seeking to lead, an agile organization who wish to use an innovative model to raise their organization's agile performance from one level to the next, all the way to mastery

Don't engineer by coincidence-design it like you mean it! Filled with practical techniques, Design It! is the perfect introduction to software architecture for programmers who are ready to grow their design skills. Lead your team as a software architect, ask the right stakeholders the right questions, explore design options, and help your team implement a system that promotes the right -ilities. Share your design decisions, facilitate collaborative design workshops that are fast, effective, and fun-and develop more awesome software! With dozens of design methods, examples, and practical know-how, Design It! shows you how to become a software architect. Walk through the core concepts every architect must know, discover how to apply them, and learn a variety of skills that will make you a better programmer, leader, and designer. Uncover the big ideas behind software architecture and gain confidence working on projects big and small. Plan, design, implement, and evaluate software architectures and collaborate with your team, stakeholders, and other architects. Identify the right stakeholders and understand their needs, dig for architecturally significant requirements, write amazing quality attribute scenarios, and make confident decisions. Choose technologies based on their architectural impact, facilitate architecture-centric design workshops, and evaluate architectures using lightweight, effective methods. Write lean architecture descriptions people love to read. Run an architecture design studio, implement the architecture you've designed, and grow your team's architectural knowledge. Good design requires good communication. Talk about your software architecture with stakeholders using whiteboards, documents, and code, and apply architecture-focused design methods in your day-to-day practice. Hands-on exercises, real-world scenarios, and practical team-based decision-making tools will get everyone on board and give you the experience you need to become a confident software architect.

Master how to leverage your data to improve business performance.

It is, indeed, widely acceptable today that nowhere is it more important to focus on the improvement of software quality than in the case of systems with requirements in the areas of safety and reliability - especially for distributed, real-time and embedded systems. Thus, much research work is under progress in these fields, since software process improvement impinges directly on achieved levels of quality, and many application experiments aim to show quantitative results demonstrating the efficacy of particular approaches. Requirements for safety and reliability - like other so-called non-functional requirements for computer-based systems - are often stated in imprecise and ambiguous terms, or not at all. Specifications focus on functional and technical aspects, with issues like safety covered only implicitly, or not addressed directly because they are felt to be obvious; unfortunately what is obvious to an end user or system user is progressively less so to others, to the extend that a software developer may not even be aware that safety is an issue. Therefore, there is a growing evidence for encouraging greater understanding of safety and reliability requirements issues, right across the spectrum from end user to software developer; not just in traditional safety-critical areas (e.g. nuclear, aerospace) but also acknowledging the need for such things as heart pacemakers and other medical and robotic systems to be highly dependable.

Get the most out of this foundational reference and improve the productivity of your software teams. This open access book collects the wisdom of the 2017 "Dagstuhl" seminar on productivity in software engineering, a meeting of community leaders, who came together with the goal of rethinking traditional definitions and measures of productivity. The results of their work, Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering, includes chapters covering definitions and core concepts related to productivity, guidelines for measuring productivity in specific contexts, best practices and pitfalls, and theories and open questions on productivity. You'll benefit from the many short chapters, each offering a focused discussion on one aspect of productivity in software engineering. Readers in many fields and industries will benefit from their collected work. Developers wanting to improve their personal productivity, will learn effective strategies for overcoming common issues that interfere with progress. Organizations thinking about building internal programs for measuring productivity of programmers and teams will learn best practices from industry and researchers in measuring productivity. And researchers can leverage the conceptual frameworks and rich body of literature in the book to effectively pursue new research directions. What You'll LearnReview the definitions and dimensions of software productivity See how time management is having the opposite of the intended effect Develop valuable dashboards Understand the impact of sensors on productivity Avoid software development waste Work with human-centered methods to measure productivity Look at the intersection of neuroscience and productivity Manage interruptions and context-switching Who Book Is For Industry developers and those responsible for seminar-style courses that include a segment on software developer productivity. Chapters are written for a generalist audience, without excessive use of technical terminology.