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.
Background: Continuous experimentation (CE) has been proposed as a data-driven approach to software product development. Several challenges with this approach have been described in large organisations, but its application in smaller companies with early-stage products remains largely unexplored. Aims: The goal of this study is to understand what factors could affect the adoption of CE in early-stage software startups. Method: We present a descriptive multiple-case study of five startups in Finland which differ in their utilisation of experimentation. Results: We find that practices often ment…
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…
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 communit…
Software startups continue to be important drivers of economy globally. As the initial investment required to found a new software company becomes smaller and smaller resulting from technological advances such as cloud technology, increasing numbers of new software startups are born. Typically, the main argument for studying software startups is that they differ from mature software organizations in various ways, thus making the findings of many existing studies not directly applicable to them. How, exactly, software startups really differ from other types of software organizations as an on-go…
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 finding…
Product innovation is a risky activity, but when successful, it enables large software companies accrue high profits and leapfrog the competition. Internal startups have been promoted as one way to foster product innovation in large companies, which allows them to innovate as startups do. However, internal startups in large companies are challenging endeavours despite of the promised benefits. How large software companies can leverage internal startups in software product innovation is not fully understood due to the scarcity of the relevant studies. Based on a conceptual framework that combin…
Context: DevOps and microservices are acknowledged to be important new paradigms to tackle contemporary software demands and provide capabilities for rapid and reliable software development. Industrial reports show that they are quickly adopted together in massive software companies. However, because of the technical and organizational requirements, many difficulties against efficient implementation of the both emerge in real software teams. Objectives: This study aims to discover the organization, benefits and issues of software teams using DevOps & microservices from an immersive perspective…
Tools for managing technical skills are used in many companies, but there has been little discussion about how such tools are used in practice. We report here on different types of actual usage in a medium-size software consulting company. We expected such tools to be used for allocating resources to new projects and for searching for competence to solve problems, but also observed two other types of usage: identifying new project opportunities, and skills upgrading. This multitude of uses support learning practices and motivates tool use both at individual and company levels, which is crucial…
The phenomenon of adopting open source software development practices in a corporate environment is known by many names, one being inner source. The objective of this study is to investigate how an organization consisting of small development teams can benefit from adopting inner source and assess the level of applicability. The research has been conducted as a case study at a software development company. Data collection was carried out through interviews and a series of focus group meetings, and then analyzed by mapping it to an available framework. The analysis shows that the organization p…
Software development meets the various challenges of rapidly growing markets. To address such challenges projects to design and adopt specific development approaches. However, various project management approaches do not consider the uncertainties that exist in projects. In this paper, we present findings from a case study in which we explore how to apply the Management Uncertainty Software Project (MUPS) approach. We do so by the empirical investigation at a public organization in Brazil. The objective of this study is to contribute to the body of knowledge regarding the potential benefits of…
The enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 forced any organization that collects and/or processes EU-based personal data to comply with stringent privacy regulations. Software organizations have struggled to achieve GDPR compliance both before and after the GDPR deadline. While some studies have relied on surveys or interviews to find general implications of the GDPR, there is a lack of in-depth studies that investigate compliance practices and compliance challenges of software organizations. In particular, there is no information on small and medium enterprises (SM…
The values of software organizations are crucial for achieving high performance; in particular, agile development approaches emphasize their importance. Researchers have thus far often assumed that a specific set of values, compatible with the development methodologies, must be adopted homogeneously throughout the company. It is not clear, however, to what extent such assumptions are accurate. Preliminary findings have highlighted the misalignment of values between groups as a source of problems when engineers discuss their challenges. Therefore, in this study, we examine how discrepancies in …
Video game development is a complex endeavor, often involving complex software, large organizations, and aggressive release deadlines. Several studies have reported that periods of "crunch time" are prevalent in the video game industry, but there are few studies on the effects of time pressure. We conducted a survey with participants of the Global Game Jam (GGJ), a 48-hour hackathon. Based on 198 responses, the results suggest that: (1) iterative brainstorming is the most popular method for conceptualizing initial requirements; (2) continuous integration, minimum viable product, scope manageme…
In software industry, the DevOps is an increasingly adopting software development paradigm. Towards the sustainable DevOps adoption, there is a need to transform the organization Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing (CAMS) aspects concerning to core theme of continues development and operations. The software organizations face several complexities while implementing the DevOps principles. The sustainable DevOps implementation assist the software organizations to develop the quality projects with good return on investment. This evidence-based study aims to explore the guidelines of sust…
This early work aims to allow organizations to diagnose their capacity to properly adopt microservices through initial milestones of a Microservice Maturity Model (MiMMo). The objective is to prepare the way towards a general framework to help companies and industries to determine their microservices maturity. Organizations lean more and more on distributed web applications and Line of Business software. This is particularly relevant during the current Covid-19 crisis, where companies are even more challenged to offer their services online, targeting a very high level of responsiveness in the …
Capstone courses in undergraduate software engineering are a critical final milestone for students. These courses allow students to create a software solution and demonstrate the knowledge they accumulated in their degrees. However, a typical capstone project team is small containing no more than 5 students and function independently from other teams. To better reflect real-world software development and meet industry demands, we introduce in this paper our novel capstone course. Each student was assigned to a large-scale, multi-team (i.e., company) of up to 20 students to collaboratively buil…
Context: While there are many success stories of achieving high reuse and improved quality using software platforms, there is a need to investigate the issues and challenges organizations face when transitioning to a software platform strategy. Objective: This case study provides a comprehensive taxonomy of the challenges faced when a medium-scale organization decided to adopt software platforms. The study also reveals how new trends in software engineering (i.e. agile methods, distributed development and flat management structures) interplayed with the chosen platform strategy. Method: We use…
Traditionally, software APIs (application programming interfaces) have been viewed from a technical perspective, as a means to separate implementation from functional calls, and as a way to define a contract of software functionality. The technical benefits of APIs have been reported in numerous studies. Several reports from industry offer useful practical design considerations for APIs, including advice on collecting usage data, monetization strategies, and at what point to open an API to external parties. Although this advice can be useful, the focus is still often on the API, only without c…
Software companies and startups often follow the idea of flourishing happiness among developers. Perks, playground rooms, free breakfast, remote office options, sports facilities near the companies, company retreats, you name it. The rationale is that happy developers should be more productive and also retained. But is it the case that happy software engineers are more productive? Moreover, are perks the way to go to make developers happy? Are developers happy at all? What are the consequences of unhappiness among software engineers? These questions are important to ask both from the perspecti…
Many software projects are no longer done in-house by a single organization. Instead, we are in a new age where software is developed by a networked community of individuals and organizations, which base their relations to each other on mutual interest. Paradoxically, recent research suggests that software development can actually be jointly-developed by rival firms. For instance, it is known that the mobile-device makers Apple and Samsung kept collaborating in open source projects while running expensive patent wars in the court. Taking a case study approach, we explore how rival firms collab…
