Jarno Vähäniitty

Lic. Sc. (Tech.)
M. Sc. (Tech.)
Researcher, Project manager
Helsinki University of Technology
Software Business and Engineering Institute

Work

I currently work as the project manager of the ATMAN (Approach and Tool support for development portfolio MANagement) research project of the Software Process Research Group (SPRG) at the Software Business and Engineering Institute at Helsinki University of Technology. ATMAN helps the Finnish Software Industry better link business strategies and long-term product development plans with daily work through 1) managing the developers’ efforts as an explicit portfolio and 2) providing an understanding of the needed tool support and 3) empirically validating the approach and implementing an open source proof-of-concept prototype tool(set) for development portfolio management (also known as the Agilefant). ATMAN involves seven industrial partners, as well as two international and one domestic research partners. ATMAN is planned to span the time period 1.11.2007 – 31.10.2010.

Before ATMAN I headed the Software product Health And Process Excellence (SHAPE, 2004-2007) and Software Engineering Management System (SEMS, 2001-2004) research projects. See the projects' homepages and our publications for more information.

Research Interests

My doctoral research aimed at understanding and describing how to manage the development efforts as an explicit portfolio in small organizations developing software. As for my other research interests, they lie within the scope of the ATMAN project.

Teaching Activities

Currently, only occasional lecturing on how to manage software product development and software development portfolios on various courses at HUT.

In the Spring of 2005 I (together with Laura Lehtola from the CORE research project) organised a three-credit seminar study on managing software product development. You can download the resulting set of seminar studies here.

Office Hours

To set up a meeting, please email me.

Hobbies and Interests

If you would like to know more, take a look at my personal homepage.

Publications

Listed starting from the most recent ones; please see the pages of the ATMAN, SHAPE and SEMS projects for more of our team's publications.

  1. Vähäniitty, Lassenius, Rautiainen & Pekkanen: Long-term Planning of Development Efforts by Roadmapping - a Model and Experiences from a Small Software Company (PDF, presentation slides). In the proceedings of Euromicro 2009 Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)
  2. Vähäniitty, Rautiainen & Lassenius: Small Software Organizations Need Explicit Portfolio Management. Revised draft; forthcoming in IBM journal of Research and Development, Special Issue on Creating Business Value through Software Development, Fall 2009
  3. Lehtola, Kauppinen, Vähäniitty & Komssi: Linking business and requirements engineering: is solution plannning a missing activity in software product companies? Requirements engineering journal, Special issue RE'07 best papers, Volume 14, Number 2 / June, Springer-Verlag 2009
  4. Vähäniitty & Rautiainen: Towards a Conceptual Framework and Tool Support for Linking Long-term Product and Business Planning with Agile Software Development. International Workshop on Software Development Governance (SDG2008).
  5. Lehtola, L. & Kauppinen M. & Vähäniitty, J. "Strengthening the link from business decisions to requirements engineering: Long-term product planning in software product companies". Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'07), New Delhi, India, Oct 2007
  6. Vähäniitty, J. "Do Small Software Companies Need Portfolio Management?”. Proceedings of the 13th International Product Development Management Conference, Milan, Italy, Jun 2006 (presentation slides).
  7. Vähäniitty, J. "Do Small Software Companies Need Portfolio Management, Too?”. Licenciate Thesis, Helsinki University of Technology, 2/2006.
  8. Kaarlas, J. & Vähäniitty, J. "Tool support for software product and release planning - requirements and current solutions". Working paper, 8/2005
  9. Vähäniitty, J. "A Tentative Framework for Connecting Long-Term Business and Product Planning with Iterative & Incremental Software Product Development". In proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Economic-Driven Software Engineering Research (EDSER-7) at ICSE 2005, St. Louis, USA, 2005 (presentation slides)
  10. Vähäniitty, J & Rautiainen, K. "Towards an Approach for Development Portfolio Management in Small Product-Oriented Software Companies". In proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-38), Jan 2005. (presentation slides)
  11. Vähäniitty, J. "Product Portfolio Management in Small Software Product Businesses - a Tentative Research Agenda". In proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Economic-Driven Software Engineering Research (EDSER-6) at ICSE 2004, pp. 48-52, Edinburgh, 2004. (presentation slides)
  12. Vähäniitty, J.: "Commercial Product Management" and "Pipeline Management"; Rautiainen, K. & Vähäniitty, J.: "An Introduction to the SEMS Approach". Chapters in "Pacing Software Product Development: A Framework and Practical Implementation Guidelines". eds. Rautiainen, K., and C. Lassenius. Helsinki University of Technology Software Business and Engineering Institute Technical Reports 3, pp. 23-49. Helsinki, 2004 (electronic edition of the book published 9/2006)
  13. Vähäniitty, J. "Key Decisions in Strategic New Product Development for Small Software Product Businesses". EUROMICRO 2003, Software Process and Product Improvement Track / Software Engineering in Small and Very Small Enterprises, Antalya, Turkey, 2003. (presentation slides).
  14. Vähäniitty, J. "Business-Driven New Product Development Process Improvement in Small Software Product Businesses - Theory and a Research Approach". EUROMICRO 2003, Software Process and Product Improvement Track / Work-in-Progress session, Antalya, Turkey, 2003. (presentation slides)
  15. Vähäniitty, J. "Product Strategy Decisions in Small Software Product Businesses - a Framework and Experiences". Master's Thesis, Helsinki University of Technology, Institute of Software Business and Engineering, 2003.
  16. Vähäniitty, J., Lassenius, C., & Rautiainen, K. "An Approach to Product Roadmapping in Small Software Product Businesses", Quality Connection - 7th European Conference on Software Quality - Conference Notes, pp. 12-13, (2002)
  17. Rautiainen, K., Lassenius, C., Vähäniitty, J., Vanhanen, J., & Pyhäjärvi, M. "A Tentative Framework for Managing Software Product Development in Small Companies", Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-35), 2002.

Involvement in the research community

Program committee member of the 2nd International Workshop of Software Product Management (9.9.2008)

Program committee member of the Software Process and Product Improvement track of the 33nd EUROMICRO Conference on
Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (27.-31.8.2007)

Program committee member of the Software Process and Product Improvement track of the 32nd EUROMICRO Conference on
Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (29.8.-1.9.2006)

Program committee member of the Software Process and Product Improvement track of the 31st EUROMICRO Conference on
Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (30.8.-3.9.2005)

Program committee member of the Software Process and Product Improvement track of the 30th EUROMICRO Conference  on
Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (1.-3.9.2004)

Contact information