Metrics are widely used in the software engineering industry and can serve as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which are used by management to make informed decisions and understand the performance of the organisation. Many companies measure themselves against industry-standard metrics, in addition to their own set of metrics. This thesis aims to investigate the relationship between these industry-standard metrics and the metrics that are additionally collected. Instead of focusing on the performance of a single organisation, the DORA report focuses on the comparison of organisations. It measures the Software Delivery and Operational (SDO) performance of organisations by four key and industry-standard metrics representing two aspects, stability and throughput, of a software product. The use of one metric as a proxy for another metric or a thematic group of metrics is a common phenomenon. However, there rarely is evidence supporting the assumption that the proxy reflects the intended metric or represents the full thematic group. This thesis performs a single case study within ING, a large and highly digital bank in the Netherlands. It investigates the KPIs that are collected by the bank and analyses the relationships between those KPIs and the four metrics from the DORA report. It establishes a list of 27 KPIs that are in use by ING and shows that there are no correlations between the DORA metrics as collected within the bank and that these metrics show very little correlation with the metrics that ING collects additionally. Furthermore, it is established that nearly all metrics contain a bias at the organisational level and that these biases have a significant impact on the correlation between metrics.
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Nowadays, entering into a contract with an overseas company still relies on postal services to send a printed contract, which is signed on paper. Lizard Global is developing an online platform for constructing, reviewing and signing digital contracts for one of their clients. In the original system, when a signee signed a contract, his personal information was used as a signature and stored in blockchain. However, this way of signing a contract does not enjoy the same degree of legal validity as a written signature. Moreover, the implications on privacy legislation, specifically the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) had not yet been taken into account by Lizard Global. This project describes how agile development was used to construct a high quality software solution to the problem, thereby implementing firstly an advanced e-signature to make signing a contract legally binding and secondly functionality to store this signature in blockchain such that it is compliant with the GDPR legislation. This is done by only storing hashed values in the blockchain and adding a user panel. In this panel, signees are able to control their personal data. High quality is obtained by testing thoroughly (100 per cent branch coverage), using the static analysis tool ESLint and requesting, receiving and implementing feedback from the software improvement group.
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