0000000000544729
AUTHOR
Matti Saarikallio
Quality culture boosts agile transformation : Action research in a business‐to‐business software business
Agile methodologies are sometimes adopted, with the assumption that benefits can be attained by only using a set of best practices, which can sometimes work to a degree. In this paper, a case is discussed where a software-producing organization of seven teams achieved significant improvements. The goal of the research was to answer two questions: how an already agile organization could improve its performance further and what is the impact of promoting quality aspects? The questions were answered by implementing interventions based on prior literature and data emerging from semi-structured interviews. The context was an established business with a complex revenue stream structure, meaning t…
Metrics Framework for Cycle-Time Reduction in Software Value Creation
Agile software development methodologies driving cycle-time reduction have been shown to improve efficiency, enable shorter lead times and place a stronger focus on customer needs. They are also moving the process development focus from cost-reduction towards value creation. Optimizing software development based on lean and agile principles requires tools and metrics to optimize against. We need a new set of metrics that measure the process up to the point of customer use and feedback. With these we can drive cycle time reduction and improve value focus. Recently the lean startup methodology has been promoting a similar approach within the startup context. In this paper, we develop and vali…
Following the Money: Revenue Stream Constituents in Case of Within-firm Variation
The idea of this paper stems from the perception that the concept of revenue stream requires clarification and further division to be applicable to businesses with high internal variation in their methods of capturing revenue. Current study sets out to investigate the concept of revenue stream through an overview of previous literature and a case study to demonstrate how revenue streams of a b2b (business-to-business) software service firm can be analyzed by elaborating the concept further. The aim is to answer the following research questions: 1) What are the relevant constituents of the revenue stream concept within a b2b software services firm? 2) How revenue stream as part of the busine…