Viktoria Stray

Viktoria Stray, Elias Goldmann Brandtzæg, Viggo Tellefsen Wivestad et al.

This study investigates the real-world impact of the generative AI (GenAI) tool GitHub Copilot on developer activity and perceived productivity. We conducted a mixed-methods case study in NAV IT, a large public sector agile organization. We analyzed 26,317 unique non-merge commits from 703 of NAV IT's GitHub repositories over a two-year period, focusing on commit-based activity metrics from 25 Copilot users and 14 non-users. The analysis was complemented by survey responses on their roles and perceived productivity, as well as 13 interviews. Our analysis of activity metrics revealed that individuals who used Copilot were consistently more active than non-users, even prior to Copilot's introduction. We did not find any statistically significant changes in commit-based activity for Copilot users after they adopted the tool, although minor increases were observed. This suggests a discrepancy between changes in commit-based metrics and the subjective experience of productivity.

Aleksander Jarzębowicz, Adam Przybyłek, Jacinto Estima et al.

As organizations grapple with the rapid adoption of Generative AI (GenAI), this study synthesizes the state of knowledge through a systematic literature review of secondary studies and research agendas. Analyzing 28 papers published since 2023, we find that while GenAI offers transformative potential for productivity and innovation, its adoption is constrained by multiple interrelated challenges, including technical unreliability (hallucinations, performance drift), societal-ethical risks (bias, misuse, skill erosion), and a systemic governance vacuum (privacy, accountability, intellectual property). Interpreted through a socio-technical lens, these findings reveal a persistent misalignment between GenAI's fast-evolving technical subsystem and the slower-adapting social subsystem, positioning IS research as critical for achieving joint optimization. To bridge this gap, we discuss a research agenda that reorients IS scholarship from analyzing impacts toward actively shaping the co-evolution of technical capabilities with organizational procedures, societal values, and regulatory institutions--emphasizing hybrid human--AI ensembles, situated validation, design principles for probabilistic systems, and adaptive governance.

Nils Brede Moe, Rasmus Ulfsnes, Viktoria Stray et al.

Software development companies organize hackathons to encourage innovation. Despite many benefits of hackathons, in large-scale agile organizations where many teams work together, stopping the ongoing work results in a significant decrease in the immediate output. Motivated by the need to understand whether and how to run hackathons, we investigated how the practice affects productivity on the individual and organizational levels. By mapping the benefits and challenges to an established productivity framework, we found that hackathons improve developers' satisfaction and well-being, strengthen the company culture, improve performance (as many ideas are tested), increase activity (as the ideas are developed quickly), and improve communication and collaboration (because the social network is strengthened). Addressing managerial concerns, we found that hackathons also increase efficiency and flow because people learn to complete work and make progress quickly, and they build new competence. Finally, with respect to virtual hackathons we found that developers work more in isolation because tasks are split between team members resulting in less collaboration. This means that some important, expected hackathon values in virtual contexts require extra effort and cannot be taken for granted.

Marius Mikalsen, Nils Brede Moe, Sut I Wong et al.

We report findings from a case study of a large agile information systems development (ISD) organization`s sudden transformation to distributed, digital work in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It seeks to understand how knowledge creation and sharing changes. The findings show various forms of distance being introduced, digital tool usage, increased task orientation, and variations across teams. To analyze the findings, we use the concepts of large-scale collaborations and sociability. Large-scale collaboration offers a socio-technical perspective on tackling distributed knowledge sharing and creation in the presence of multiple, loosely coupled partners using digital tools for collaboration. We show what the digital tools afford using the concept of sociability. We discuss how distributed digital practices make teams more task-oriented and that creating and maintaining sociability, a key issue for knowledge sharing in agile ISD organizations, require relation oriented communication during practical problem solving using digital tools.

Rasmus Ulfsnes, Viktoria Stray, Nils Brede Moe et al.

Hackathons are events in which diverse teams work together to explore, and develop solutions, software or even ideas. Hackathons have been recognized not only as public events for hacking, but also as a corporate mechanism for innovation. Hackathons are a way for established companies to achieve increased employee wellbeing as well as being a curator for innovation and developing new products. Sudden transition to the work-from-home mode caused by the COVID-19 pandemic first put many corporate events requiring collocation, such as hackathons, temporarily on hold and then motivated companies to find ways to hold these events virtually. In this paper, we report our findings from investigating hackathons in the context of a large agile company by first exploring the general benefits and challenges of hackathons and then trying to understand how they were affected by the virtual setup. We conducted nine interviews, surveyed 23 employees and analyzed a hackathon demo. We found that hackathons provide both individual and organizational benefits of innovation, personal interests, and acquiring new skills and competences. Several challenges such as added stress due to stopping the regular work, employees fearing not having enough contribution to deliver and potential mismatch between individual and organizational goals were also found. With respect to the virtual setup, we found that virtual hackathons are not diminishing the innovation benefits, however, some negative effect surfaced on the social and networking side.

Darja Smite, Marius Mikalsen, Nils B. Moe et al.

Along with the increasing popularity of agile software development, software work has become much more social than ever. Contemporary software teams rely on a variety of collaborative practices, such as pair programming, the topic of our study. Many agilists advocated the importance of collocation, face-to-face interaction, and physical artefacts incorporated in the shared workspace, which the COVID-19 pandemic made unavailable; most software companies around the world were forced to send their engineers to work from home. As software projects and teams overnight turned into dis-tributed collaborations, we question what happened to the pair programming practice in the work-from-home mode. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of remote pair programming in two companies. We conducted 38 interviews with 30 engineers from Norway, Sweden, and the USA, and used the results of a survey in one of the case companies. Our study is unique as we collected the data longitudinally in April/May 2020, Sep/Oct 2020, and Jan/Feb 2021. We found that pair programming has decreased and some interviewees report not pairing at all for almost a full year. The experiences of those who paired vary from actively co-editing the code by using special tools to more passively co-reading and discussing the code and solutions by sharing the screen. Finally, we found that the interest in and the use of PP over time, since the first months of forced work from home to early 2021, has admittedly increased, also as a social practice.

Yngve Lindsjørn, Steffen Almås, Viktoria Stray

In the spring of 2020, the Department of Informatics covered a 20 ECTS capstone course in Software Engineering, mainly focusing on developing a complex application. The course used active learning methods, and 240 students were working in 42 cross-functional, agile teams. The pandemic caused by the coronavirus had a significant impact on the teaching given by the University of Oslo, as all physical education and collaboration among the teams had to be digital from March 12. At the end of the semester, we conducted a survey that focused on 1) aspects of teamwork (e.g., communication and coordination in the teams) and the relation to team performance (e.g., the application product) and 2), the students' motivation and ability to cooperate through digital platforms. A total of 151 respondents in 41 agile student teams answered the survey. This study aimed to investigate how the teamwork and motivation of the students were affected by having to work virtually. The results are compared to results from the same course in 2019 and a similar survey on 71 professional teams published in 2016. Our results show that the teamwork was evaluated similarly to both the evaluation of survey conducted in 2019 and on the professional teams in 2016. The motivation among the students remained high, even though they had to collaborate virtually.

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.

Viktoria Stray, Nils Brede Moe

Given the relevance of coordination in the field of global software engineering, this work was carried out to further understand coordination mechanisms. Specifically, we investigated meetings and the collaboration tool Slack. We conducted a longitudinal case study using a mixed-methods approach with surveys, observations, interviews, and chat logs. Our quantitative results show that employees in global projects spend 7 hours 45 minutes per week on average in scheduled meetings and 8 hours 54 minutes in unscheduled meetings. Furthermore, distributed teams were significantly larger than co-located teams, and people working in distributed teams spent somewhat more time in meetings per day. We found that low availability of key people, absence of organizational support for unscheduled meetings and unbalanced activity from team members in meetings and on Slack were barriers for effective coordination across sites. The positive aspects of using collaboration tools in distributed teams were increased team awareness and informal communication and reduced the need for e-mail. Our study emphasizes the importance of reflecting on how global software engineering teams use meetings and collaboration tools to coordinate. We provide practical advice for conducting better meetings and give suggestions for more efficient use of collaboration tools in global projects.

Viktoria Stray, Nils Brede Moe, Rashina Hoda

According to the principles articulated in the agile manifesto, motivated and empowered software developers relying on technical excellence and simple designs, create business value by delivering working software to users at regular short intervals. These principles have spawned many practices. At the core of these practices is the idea of autonomous, self-managing, or self-organizing teams whose members work at a pace that sustains their creativity and productivity. This article summarizes the main challenges faced when implementing autonomous teams and the topics and research questions that future research should address.

Viktoria Stray, Nils Brede Moe, Dag I. K. Sjøberg

Members of high performing software teams collaborate, exchange information and coordinate their work on a frequent, regular basis. Most teams have the daily stand-up meeting as a central venue for these activities. Although this kind of meeting is one of the most popular agile practices, it has received little attention from researchers. We observed 102 daily stand-ups and interviewed 60 members of 15 teams in five countries. We found that the practice is usually challenging to conduct in a way that benefits the whole team. Many team members have a negative experience from conducting the meeting, which reduces job satisfaction, co-worker trust and well-being. However, the practice can be adjusted and improved to empower teams. In this article, we describe key factors that affect the meeting and propose four recommendations for improving the practice.