Anastasiia Tkalich

Zheying Zhang, Tomas Herda, Victoria Pichler et al.

This paper synthesizes the key findings from a full-day XP2025 workshop on "AI and Agile: From Frustration to Success", held in Brugg-Windisch, Switzerland. The workshop brought together over 30 interdisciplinary academic researchers and industry practitioners to tackle the concrete challenges and emerging opportunities at the intersection of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and agile software development. Through structured, interactive breakout sessions, participants identified shared pain points like tool fragmentation, governance, data quality, and critical skills gaps in AI literacy and prompt engineering. These issues were further analyzed, revealing underlying causes and cross-cutting concerns. The workshop concluded by collaboratively co-creating a multi-thematic research roadmap, articulating both short-term, implementable actions and visionary, long-term research directions. This cohesive agenda aims to guide future investigation and drive the responsible, human-centered integration of GenAI into agile practices.

Anastasiia Tkalich, Nils Brede Moe, Rasmus Ulfsnes

With the increasing availability of software usage and the influence of the Lean Startup mindset, more and more companies choose to innovate through internal software startups. Such startups aim at developing new business models while at the same time relying on the resources from the companies where they emerged. The evidence from both researchers and practitioners indicates that driving internal software startups is challenging. This paper seeks to address this problem by asking the research question: how to make internal software startups work? We examined a unique case of a venture builder, a company primarily focusing on building internal software startups and launching them as independent companies. Applying a Grounded Theory approach, we analyzed data on four internal software startups at the case company. The results suggest that four strategies drive the examined startups, cultural, financial, personnel, and venture arrangement. We interpret our results by drawing on earlier literature on intrapreneurship and internal ventures and suggest four recommendations to succeed with internal software startups 1 establish shared arenas for the employees, 2 provide necessary resources for experimentation in the initial phase and increase them incrementally, 3 build up in-house product management competence through coaching, and 4 harness employees own motivation to develop their own ideas.

Marte Pettersen Buvik, Anastasiia Tkalich

Psychological safety has been postulated as a key factor for the success of agile software development teams, yet there is a lack of empirical studies investigating the role of psychological safety in this context. The present study examines how work design characteristics of software development teams (autonomy, task interdependence, and role clarity) influence psychological safety and, further, how psychological safety impacts team performance, either directly or indirectly through team reflexivity. We test our model using survey data from 236 team members in 43 software development teams in Norway. Our results show that autonomy boosts psychological safety in software teams, and that psychological safety again has a positive effect on team reflexivity and a direct effect on team performance.

Tor Sporsem, Anastasiia Tkalich, Nils Brede Moe et al.

Software product innovation in large organizations is fundamentally chal-lenging because of restrained freedom and flexibility to conduct experi-ments. As a response, large agile companies form internal startups to initiate employ-driven innovation, inspired by Lean startup. This case study investi-gates how communities of practice support five internal startups in develop-ing new software products within a large organization. We observed six communities of practice meetings, two workshops and conducted ten semi-structured interviews over the course of a year. Our findings show that a community of practice, called the Innovation guild, allowed internal startups to help each other by collectively solving problems, creating shared practic-es, and sharing knowledge. This study confirms that benefits documented in earlier research into CoPs also hold true in the context of software product innovation in large organizations. Henceforth, we suggest that similar innova-tion guilds, as described in this paper, can support large companies in the in-novation race for new software products.

Anastasiia Tkalich, Nils Brede Moe, Tor Sporsem

To keep up with the pace of innovation, established companies are increasingly relying on internal software startups. However, succeeding with such startups is a challenging task because internal startups need to find a balance between the interests of the company and the interest of the innovator. One approach that is argued to strengthen innovation in existing companies is employee-driven innovation (EDI). This study explores this argument by examining two internal software startups in companies aligned with the principles of EDI and with a strong focus on innovation. The preliminary findings indicate that startups with EDI are characterized by commitment towards innovation, cooperative orientation, and autonomy. The findings suggest that internal software startups may be strengthened when the parent companies practice EDI.

Tor Sporsem, Anastasiia Tkalich, Nils Brede Moe et al.

Large global companies need to speed up their innovation activities to increase competitive advantage. However, such companies' organizational structures impede their ability to capture trends they are well aware of due to bureaucracy, slow decision-making, distributed departments, and distributed processes. One way to strengthen the innovation capability is through fostering internal startups. We report findings from an embedded multiple-case study of five internal startups in a globally distributed company to identify barriers for software product innovation: late involvement of software developers, executive sponsor is missing or not clarified, yearly budgeting and planning, unclear decision-making authority, lack of digital infrastructure for experimentation and access to data from external actors. Drawing on the framework of continuous software engineering proposed by Fitzgerald and Stol, we discuss the role of BizDev in software product innovation. We suggest that lack of continuity, rather than the lack of speed, is an ultimate challenge for internal startups in large global companies.

Viktoria Stray, Anastasiia Tkalich, Nils Brede Moe

It is increasingly common to introduce agile coaches to help gain speed and advantage in agile companies. Following the success of Spotify, the role of the agile coach has branched out in terms of tasks and responsibilities, but little research has been conducted to examine how this role is practiced. This paper examines the role of the agile coach through 19 semistructured interviews with agile coaches from ten different companies. We describe the role in terms of the tasks the coach has in agile projects, valuable traits, skills, tools, and the enablers of agile coaching. Our findings indicate that agile coaches perform at the team and organizational levels. They affect effort, strategies, knowledge, and skills of the agile teams. The most essential traits of an agile coach are being emphatic, people-oriented, able to listen, diplomatic, and persistent. We suggest empirically based advice for agile coaching, for example companies giving their agile coaches the authority to implement the required organizational changes within and outside the teams.