Theses and articles

Bachelor's thesis: Freemium pricing strategy: Opportunities and challenges from the point of view of SaaS vendors

Published by: AriTurunen Last modified: 2012.01.25

The breakthrough of the SaaS (Software as a service) has led to the withdrawal of the traditional software pricing strategies and forced software vendors to change their established business practices.

This literature review introduces the main features of the freemium pricing strategy and handles the opportunities and challenges of this strategy from the point of view of the SaaS vendor.

The results of the study show that the freemium pricing strategy is a very powerful marketing tool. It can be used to attract attention of the audience and achieve a considerable market share. In addition to that, the freemium pricing strategy effectively improves diffusion to the markets and it is proven that company can benefit from the network effects of the software markets by using freemium. The main challenges of the freemium pricing strategy are the suspicious attitude towards free products, the decrease of the appreciation of the product and the difficulty of achieving a considerable market share. Further, the success in versioning of the product and the conversion rate from users to customers are emphasized. Study shows that at the moment there is considerably little research about the challenges of freemium model.

Turunen, Tanja

Freemium pricing strategy: Opportunities and challenges from the point of view of SaaS vendors (in Finnish)

Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2011, 28 p.

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Dissertation: Lean Thinking in Software Development: Impacts of Kanban on Projects

Published by: AriTurunen Last modified: 2011.12.16

The history of software development in a somewhat systematical way has been performed for half a century. Despite this time period, serious failures in software development projects still occur.

The pertinent mission of software project management is to continuously achieve more and more successful projects. The application of agile software methods and more recently the integration of Lean practices contribute to this trend of continuous improvement in the software industry. One such area warranting proper empirical evidence is the operational efficiency of projects.

In the field of software development, Kanban as a process management method has gained momentum recently, mostly due to its linkages to Lean thinking. However, only a few empirical studies investigate the impacts of Kanban on projects in that particular area. The aim of this doctoral thesis is to improve the understanding of how Kanban impacts on software projects.

The research is carried out in the area of Lean thinking, which contains a variety of concepts including Kanban. This article-type thesis conducts a set of case studies expanded with the research strategy of quasi-controlled experiment. The data-gathering techniques of interviews, questionnaires, and different types of observations are used to study the case projects, and thereby to understand the impacts of Kanban on software development projects.

The research papers of the thesis are refereed, international journal and conference publications. The results highlight new findings regarding the application of Kanban in the software context. The key findings of the thesis suggest that Kanban is applicable to software development.

Despite its several benefits reported in this thesis, the empirical evidence implies that Kanban is not all-encompassing but requires additional practices to keep development projects performing appropriately. Implications for research are given, as well. In addition to these findings, the thesis contributes in the area of plan-driven software development by suggesting implications both for research and practitioners. As a conclusion, Kanban can benefit software development projects but additional practices would increase its potential for the projects.

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Thesis: Coaching agile software development teams: A case study

Published by: AriTurunen Last modified: 2011.12.16

Agile software development can be described as philosophy of how software development is
conducted. Short, timeboxed iterations with adaptive, evolutionary refinement of plans and goals form the central core of the agile software development. This loose family of methodologies is usually taught via coaching.

It is not, however, currently clear in the
literature what are the facets of coaching or even what are its goals. This thesis explores the
roles of the agile coach, defining it as mentoring which aims at intervening the normal work
in a software project concerning either by the software development team, the organization of the team or the customers. The purpose of these interventions is to first teach how the agile software development is executed and later finetune the performance of the team.

This thesis by Tatu Kairi continues with an examination on what principles should the coach employ with the software development team while coaching. Framework of this interaction is developed utilising constructivist learning theory as well as using relevant computer science literature.

To be able to evaluate, if the subjects of coaching are learning and how the learning is occurring, two metrics are presented as tools for the coach to employ critical selfreflection. Sidky Agile Measurement Index (SAMI) is used to measure the level of adoption, while
similar KMSmodel was created for the purpose of this thesis to profile on a more finegrained
level, what the level of agility is composed of.

This framework is empirically tested in two case studies conducted in the Software Factory course
at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. The course provides a realistic, industrylike
setting where students form a team and complete a software development project for a real customer.

As a participatory action research, the researcher acted as a coach to two new software teams, employing the theoretical framework and recording the events of the projects to a research diary and collecting metrics for the two models. The empirical results show that the proposed
theoretical framework was successfully employed on the two case studies as well as initially asserting the expressiveness of it. This thesis concludes with a discussion of these results and the conclusions drawn of them.

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Thesis: Lean Perspective on Distributed Software Development: Case Study in Waste Factors

Published by: AriTurunen Last modified: 2011.12.09

Paula Mäenpää's master thesis (University of Helsinki) examines in what extent a distributed software development can be lean.

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Article: Cloudifying User-Created Applications in Mobile Devices

Published by: AriTurunen Last modified: 2011.11.01

Currently users own and use many networkconnected
devices such as laptop, smartphone, or tablet. The
user creates content using the default applications in these devices. One approach is to share and ubiquitously access the contents through a social media. Nevertheless, the contents residing in these devices should be available from anywhere, without any explicit user activity; even the contents residing in a remote location should also appear to be locally available in the operating device. With this approach we believe a user’s content gets cloudified, while still remaining operable with the existing applications. In this paper we propose to cloudify a user’s content in all her mobile devices.

We present a middleware that allows a user to uniformly use the existing applications on local as well as remote content, and to also share the contents in a controlled way. The middleware hides all network activity to the user; it also makes the applications almost unaware while operating on a content residing in a remote location. To evaluate our approach in a mobile device context, we also present the efficiency measures of the
middleware in terms of latency in content-retrieval, as well as
in terms of resource usage viz. power consumption.

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Thesis: An Approach to seamlessy cloudify user-generated content from mobile devices

Published by: AriTurunen Last modified: 2011.11.01

Current users own and use many network-connected devices viz. laptop, smartphone, or tablet. The user creates content using the default applications in these devices.

One approach is to share and ubiquitously access the contents through a social media or content community. Such an approach will however make the users dependent on these communities or social media; moreover the user may also lose privacy of her content and even ownership of her data depending on the licensing policy of each community.

We argue that the contents residing in mobile devices viz. smartphones or tablets, should be available from anywhere, without any explicit user activity. That is, a user’s content should get cloudified, while still remaining operable with the existing applications. In this thesis we propose to cloudify a user’s content in all her mobile devices.

We present as a proof of concept, a middleware that allows a user to use the existing applications uniformly, on local as well as remote content, and to also share the contents in a controlled way. The middleware hides all network activity from the user; it also makes the applications almost unaware while operating on a content residing in a remote location.

To evaluate our approach in a mobile device context, we also present the efficiency measures of the middleware in terms of latency in content-retrieval, as well as in terms of resource usage viz. power consumption.

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