arXiv subjects

Nils Brede Moe

Publications and source records attributed to Nils Brede Moe.

27 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Employee-Driven Innovation to Fuel Internal Software Startups: Preliminary Findings

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.

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arXiv2021

Innovation in Large-scale agile -- Benefits and Challenges of Hackathons when Hacking from Home

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.

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arXiv2021

From Forced Working-From-Home to Working-From-Anywhere: Two Revolutions in Telework

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.

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arXiv2021

Understanding Barriers to Internal Startups in Large Organizations: Evidence from a Globally Distributed Company

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.

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arXiv2020

Understanding coordination in global software engineering: A mixed-methods study on the use of meetings and Slack

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.

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arXiv2018

Towards an Understanding of Scaling Frameworks and Business Agility: A Summary of the 6th International Workshop at XP2018

Large development projects and programs are conducted using agile development methods, with an increasing body of advice from practitioners and from research. This sixth workshop showed in increasing interest in scaling frameworks and in topics related to achieving business agility. This article summarizes four contributed papers, discussions in "open space" format and also presents a revised research agenda for large-scale agile development.

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arXiv2018

Autonomous agile teams: Challenges and future directions for research

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.

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arXiv2018

Daily Stand-Up Meetings: Start Breaking the Rules

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.

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arXiv2018

Coordinating Knowledge Work in Multi-Team Programs: Findings from a Large-Scale Agile Development Program

Software development projects have undergone remarkable changes with the arrival of agile development methods. While intended for small, self-managing teams, these methods are increasingly used also for large development programs. A major challenge in programs is to coordinate the work of many teams, due to high uncertainty in tasks, a high degree of interdependence between tasks and because of the large number of people involved. This revelatory case study focuses on how knowledge work is coordinated in large-scale agile development programs by providing a rich description of the coordination practices used and how these practices change over time in a four year development program with 12 development teams. The main findings highlight the role of coordination modes based on feedback, the use of a number of mechanisms far beyond what is described in practitioner advice, and finally how coordination practices change over time. The findings are important to improve the outcome of large knowledge-based development programs by tailoring coordination practices to needs and ensuring adjustment over time.

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