Darja Smite

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.

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.

Darja Smite, Nils Brede Moe, Eriks Klotins et al.

The COVID-19 outbreak has admittedly caused a major disruption worldwide. The interruptions to production, transportation, and mobility have clearly had a significant impact on the well-functioning of the global supply and demand chain. But what happened to the companies developing digital services, such as software. Were they interrupted as much or at all? And how has the enforced Working-From-Home mode impacted their ability to continue to deliver software? We hear that some managers are concerned that their engineers are not working effectively from home, or even lack the motivation to work in general, that teams lose touch and that managers do not notice when things go wrong. In this article, we share our findings from monitoring the situation in an international software company with engineers located in Sweden, USA, and the UK. We analyzed different aspects of productivity, such as developer satisfaction and well-being, activity, communication and collaboration, efficiency and flow based on the archives of commit data, calendar invites, and Slack communication, as well as the internal reports of WFH experiences and 18 interviews. We find that company engineers continue committing code and carry out their daily duties without significant disruptions, while their routines have gradually adjusted to the new norm with new emerging practices and various changes to the old ones. In a way, our message is that there is no news, which is good news. Yet, the experiences gained with the WFH of such scale have already made significant changes in the software industry's future, work from anywhere being an example of major importance.