1. Essays for TDT4235 Tor Stålhane IDI / NTNU

2. Intro The essay counts for 30 of the 100 points used to grade the students of this course The essay must be written as a group effort All the students in a group will get the same number of points The essay should preferably be written in English although essays written in Norwegian will also be accepted.

3. Formal requirements 10 – 12 pages plus title page, 12 points Times New Roman, double line spacing The essay must have –A front page with title and the names of all the group’s participants –Introduction, main section, discussion and conclusions –At least five references that are not URLs but URLs are also allowed

4. Topics The following slides shows a set of possible essay topics. The first line of each topic shall be used as the essay’s title – also if the essay is written in Norwegian Each group must select one of the topics listed More than one group may select the same topic

5. Essay 1 Use of the TRL TRL – Technology Readiness Level – also called TRI – Technology Readiness Index – is used to assess technological products both for software and hardware. Is this a good way to assess new tools? Could the method be extended to also assess new methods and processes?

6. Essay 2 Analysis paralysis Over-reaching data-collection of as-is processes, and burgeoning project details and dependencies cause Time-To-Value to fade into oblivion. Process experts are hyper-driven to perfection and efficiency have an insatiable appetite for metrics to –demonstrate their impact –justify their effort. The bigger and more holistic the process improvement, the more impressive the measured value. How to avoid analysis – paralysis in SPI?

7. Essay 3 The OODA Loop Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act The OODA loop is used for continuous business improvement. lays out a straightforward approach to solve a challenge. The OODA loop is a competitor to the PDCA loop and may be more efficient especially in complicated situations where it is difficult to identify causes and effects. Discuss how we can use OODA in SPI

8. Essay 4 Resilience Resilience has gained some attention lately. The idea is simple: Use the plans and prescribed procedures as long as they work – make sense Drop the plans and procedures when they no longer make sense. Change to –Improvisations –Sensemaking How can we use resilience to improve software development projects?

9. Essay 5 Scrum retrospectives Scrum retrospectives are efficient in the short term because they focus on the current problems in the current project inefficient in the long term because the experiences and good ideas –Only stays in the heads of the participants –Benefits the current project only –Are not carried over to other projects in the organization except as personal knowledge How can we solve this problem?

10. Essay 6 Developers’ changing priorities There has been a significant change in developers’ priorities from 1999 to 2007. These changes has been described and partly analysed in the course compendium. The challenges are: Way has this happened? What are the consequences for software developmenet organizations?

11. Scoring scheme AreaComments Max score Score Originality9 Challenges9 Methods6 Presentation6 Sum30