Deployment and publication of software can be painful and time consuming. In this thesis we address the release management of software related to continuous integration and delivery. As collaboration is a central point in agile software development, we aim to promote collaboration in the area of release management by improving the release process. We focus on the release process, as the Rugby process model describes it. This thesis deals with the usage of releases in the context of Rugby and examines their impact. We conduct an evaluation to address the use of releases in meetings. This leads to an idea that can improve the application of releases as communication models.

Regular user feedback is important, as it helps to validate requirements and improves user satisfaction. However, it fails to unfold its full potential in many projects. Common challenges include low user motivation, fragmented feedback channels, and missing information, making it difficult for the development team to extract the underlying requirements of the user. We aim to address these problems by proposing a system for Context-Aware Feedback (CAFE), which integrates user feedback into the software evolution process. The objective is to provide a channel for users to give feedback with as little effort as possible in order to bridge the gap between users and developers. CAFE stores feedback directly in the issue tracker enriching it with recorded usage context and visualizes the evolution of requirements through user feedback. In a formative evaluation with controlled user experiments we found that both developers and users prefer CAFE to other feedback channels and that automatically gathered context data is useful. Both the fact that user feedback is saved in the issue tracker and the added value of Feedback Traceability are regarded as beneficial.

Continuous delivery allows software developers to deliver applications to the customer with a few clicks and therefore helps them to gather feedback fast. We present a continuous delivery process model and describe how we integrated this process model into the iOS Praktikum. We explain how we thought the concepts to the student using different teaching resources like a cross-project release-team. We evaluate the course using an online questionnaire after the end of the projects. Our observations show that participating students understood and applied the concepts of continuous delivery and are convinced about the benefits. Continuous delivery increased the amount of releases increased the speed of the delivery process compared to earlier versions of the Praktikum.

Mobile applications are of increasing relevance to businesses in all industries. While companies are progressively adopting agile methodologies to facilitate faster development, there is a lack of suitable workflows that accommodate all requirements and restrictions of a corporate environment. There are, however, promising approaches to continuous delivery for mobile projects in the academic field. Our goal is to transfer a well-proven process model and system from Technische Universität München (TUM) to the mobile business line at Capgemini, a multinational provider of IT consulting, outsourcing, and professional services. We describe a modified and extended process model that includes optional as well as variable subprocesses to provide a flexible solution. By allowing each project to adapt the workflow to their specific needs, we simultaneously provide a way of standardizing how continuous delivery is applied to mobile projects in the company. After evaluating our solution in eight deliberately chosen projects, results show increased frequency and thoroughness of integration, resulting in more immediate feedback about changes. Delivery is simplified and accelerated, saving both time and resources.

 Many software projects suffer from low customer acceptance levels, late change requests and development cost overruns. A main cause of these problems is a lack of shared understanding among stakeholders. Traditional requirements specification languages and methods face difficulties to create and maintain shared understanding. For example by representing requirements in several different models and transferring information from one model to another information is lost. Each transformation introduces errors and stakeholders are not capable of correcting those mistakes, because the models are not easy to understand. Projects without shared understanding between stakeholders are bound to fail. We propose a semiformal behavior-driven specification language that is derived from methods developed by practitioners over the last 10 years. Behavior-driven specification uses ubiquitous language to describe system behavior as acceptance criteria from a user perspective. These semiformal models are easy to understand for stakeholders and form a basis for communication across domains, thereby enabling shared understanding. We apply the behavior-driven specification language in an industrial case study with a small development team on a mobile application development project. In a survey we show that lack of shared understanding is a root cause of problems in the development team and in an experimental setup we show that behavior-driven specification establishes shared understanding of requirements. Moreover in another survey we observe the explanatory value of shared understanding as well as better acceptance and better team performance as outcomes of shared understanding in a real world project.