Context. Software professionals learned from their experience during the pandemic that most of their work can be done remotely, and now software companies are expected to adopt hybrid work models to avoid the resignation of talented professionals who require more flexibility and work-life balance. However, hybrid work is a spectrum of flexible work arrangements, and currently, there are no well-established hybrid work configurations to be followed in the post-pandemic period. Goal. We investigated how software engineers are experiencing the post-pandemic hybrid work landscape, aiming to understand the factors that influence their choices between remote and in-office work. Method. We explored a large South American company by collecting quantitative and qualitative data from 545 software professionals who are currently navigating diverse hybrid work arrangements tailored to their individual and team requirements. Findings. Our study revealed an array of factors that significantly impact hybrid work within the software industry, including individual preferences, work-life balance, commute time, social interactions, productivity, and more. Team dynamics, project demands, client expectations, and organizational strategies also play an important role in shaping the complex landscape of hybrid work configurations in software engineering. Conclusions. In summary, the success of hybrid work models depends on balancing individual preferences, team dynamics, and organizational strategies. Our study demonstrated that, at present, there is no one-size-fits-all individual approach to hybrid work in the software industry.
Test-Driven Development (TDD) has been claimed to increase external software quality. However, the extent to which TDD increases external quality has been seldom studied in industrial experiments. We conduct four industrial experiments in two different companies to evaluate the performance of TDD on external quality. We study whether the performance of TDD holds across premises within the same company and across companies. We identify participant-level characteristics impacting results. Iterative-Test Last (ITL), the reverse approach of TDD, outperforms TDD in three out of four premises. ITL o…
Adaptive and flexible production systems require modular and reusable software especially considering their long term life cycle of up to 50 years. SWMAT4aPS, an approach to measure Software Maturity for automated Production Systems is introduced. The approach identifies weaknesses and strengths of various companie's solutions for modularity of software in the design of automated Production Systems (aPS). At first, a self assessed questionnaire is used to evaluate a large number of companies concerning their software maturity. Secondly, we analyze PLC code, architectural levels, workflows and …
In early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic forced employees in tech companies worldwide to abruptly transition from working in offices to working from their homes. During two years of predominantly working from home, employees and managers alike formed expectations about what post-pandemic working life should look like. Many companies are currently experimenting with new work policies that balance both employee- and manager expectations to where, when and how work should be done in the future. In this article, we gather experiences from 17 companies and their sites, covering 12 countries. We share t…
The dissipation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has already taken on pandemic proportions, affecting over 100 countries in a couple of weeks. The evolution of the disease and its economic impact is highly uncertain, which brings challenges for newly created software companies. Software startups are companies that create innovative software products and services in a dynamic and fast-growing market. Agile Software Methods aims to enable startups in responding to uncertainty caused by Covid-19. This paper investigates the impact of Covid-19 in a real software star…
[Context] The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disruptive impact on how people work and collaborate across all global economic sectors, including the software business. While remote working is not new for software engineers, forced Work-from-home situations to come with both constraints, limitations, and opportunities for individuals, software teams and software companies. As the "new normal" for working might be based on the current state of Work From Home (WFH), it is useful to understand what has happened and learn from that. [Objective] The goal of this study is to gain insights on how their WF…
Background. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a widespread transition to hybrid work models (combinations of co-located and remote work) as software professionals' demanded more flexibility and improved work-life balance. However, hybrid work models reduce the spontaneous, informal face-to-face interactions that promote group maturation, cohesion, and resilience. Little is known about how software companies can successfully transition to a hybrid workforce or the factors that influence the resilience of hybrid software development teams. Goal. The purpose of this study is to explore the relation…
automated Production Systems (aPS) are highly complex, mechatronic systems that usually have to operate reliably for many decades. Standardization and reuse of control software modules is a core prerequisite to achieve the required system quality in increasingly shorter development cycles. However, industrial case studies in the field of aPS show that many aPS companies still struggle with strategically reusing software. This paper proposes a metric-based approach to objectively measure the maturity of industrial IEC 61131-based control software in aPS (MICOSE4aPS) to identify potential weakne…
Context: While many companies conduct their software testing activities in-house, many other companies outsource their software testing needs to other firms who act as software testing service providers. As a result, Testing as a Service (TaaS) has emerged as a strong service industry in the last several decades. In the context of software testing services, there could be various challenges (e.g., during the planning and service delivery phases) and, as a result, the quality of testing services is not always as expected. Objective: It is important, for both providers and also customers of test…
Nowadays, working from home (WFH) has become a popular work arrangement due to its many potential benefits for both companies and employees (e.g., increasing job satisfaction and retention of employees). Many previous studies have investigated the impact of working from home on the productivity of employees. However, most of these studies usually use a qualitative analysis method such as survey and interview, and the studied participants do not work from home for a long continuing time. Due to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a large number of companies asked their employee…
The trend of remote work, especially in the IT sector, has been on the rise in recent years, and its popularity has especially increased since the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to adopting remote work, companies also have been migrating toward managing their projects using agile processes. Agile processes promote small and continuous feedback loops powered by effective communication. In this survey, we look to discover the challenges of implementing these processes in a remote setting, specifically focusing on the impact on communication. We examine the role communication plays in an agile se…
Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, software engineers' daily life was disrupted and abruptly forced into remote working from home. This change deeply impacted typical working routines, affecting both well-being and productivity. Moreover, this pandemic will have long-lasting effects in the software industry, with several tech companies allowing their employees to work from home indefinitely if they wish to do so. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze and understand how a typical working day looks like when working from home and how individual activities affect…
Although the pandemic times of the world-wide forced working from home seem to be in the past, many knowledge workers choose to continue working predominantly from home as a partial or permanent practice. Related studies show that employees of companies from various industries, diverse in size and location, prefer to alter working in the office with working at home, coined as hybrid or flexible working arrangements. As a result, the post-pandemic times are associated with empty offices, confused managers and organizational leaders not knowing what to do with the often-expensive rental contract…
Numerous software companies are adopting value-based decision making. However, what does value mean for key stakeholders making decisions? How do different stakeholder groups understand value? Without an explicit understanding of what value means, decisions are subject to ambiguity and vagueness, which are likely to bias them. This case study provides an in-depth analysis of key stakeholders' value propositions when selecting features for a large telecommunications company's software-intensive product. Stakeholders' value propositions were elicited via interviews, which were analyzed using Gro…
Automated Production Systems (aPS) have lifetimes of up to 30-50 years, throughout which the desired products change ever more frequently. This requires flexible, reusable control software that can be easily maintained and evolved. To evaluate selected criteria that are especially relevant for maturity in software maintainability and evolvability of aPS, the approach SWMAT4aPS+ builds on a questionnaire with 52 questions. The three main research questions cover updates of software modules and success factors for both cross-disciplinary development as well as reusable models. This paper present…
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the way that software development teams onboard new hires. Previously, most software developers worked in physical offices and new hires onboarded to their teams in the physical office, following a standard onboarding process. However, when companies transitioned employees to work from home due to the pandemic, there was little to no time to develop new onboarding procedures. In this paper, we present a survey of 267 new hires at Microsoft that onboarded to software development teams during the pandemic. We explored their remote onboarding process, including …
Psychological safety is a precondition for learning and success in software teams. Companies such as SavingsBank, which is discussed in this article, have developed good practices to facilitate psychological safety, most of which depend on face-to-face interaction. However, what happens to psychological safety when working remotely? In this article, we explore how Norwegian software developers experienced pandemic and post-pandemic remote work and describe simple behaviors and attitudes related to psychological safety. We pay special attention to the hybrid work mode, in which team members alt…
Context: DevOps can be defined as a cultural movement to improve and accelerate the delivery of business value by making the collaboration between development and operations effective. Although this movement is relatively recent, there exist an intensive research around DevOps. However, the real reasons why companies move to DevOps and the results they expect to obtain have been paid little attention in real contexts. Objective: This paper aims to help practitioners and researchers to better understand the context and the problems that many companies face day to day in their organizations when…
The Covid-19 pandemic led to several challenges in everybody working life. Many companies worldwide enabled comprehensive remote work settings for their employees. Agile Software Development Teams are affected by the switch to remote work as agile methods setting communication and collaboration in focus. The well-being and motivation of software engineers and developers, which impacting their performance, are influenced by specific context factors. This paper aims to analyze identify specific context factors for a good remote work setting. We designed a single case study at a German ecommerce …
Decision making and requirements scoping occupy central roles in helping to develop products that are demanded by the customers and ensuring company strategies are accurately realized in product scope. Many companies experience continuous and frequent scope changes and fluctuations but struggle to measure the phenomena and correlate the measurement to the quality of the requirements process. We present the results from an exploratory interview study among 22 participants working with requirements management processes at a large company that develops embedded systems for a global market. Our re…
Usually, managers or technical leaders in software projects assign issues manually. This task may become more complex as more detailed is the issue description. This complexity can also make the process more prone to errors (misassignments) and time-consuming. In the literature, many studies aim to address this problem by using machine learning strategies. Although there is no specific solution that works for all companies, experience reports are useful to guide the choices in industrial auto-assignment projects. This paper presents an industrial initiative conducted in a global electronics co…
Context. As a novel coronavirus swept the world in early 2020, thousands of software developers began working from home. Many did so on short notice, under difficult and stressful conditions. Objective. This study investigates the effects of the pandemic on developers' wellbeing and productivity. Method. A questionnaire survey was created mainly from existing, validated scales and translated into 12 languages. The data was analyzed using non-parametric inferential statistics and structural equation modeling. Results. The questionnaire received 2225 usable responses from 53 countries. Factor an…
Agile is one of the terms with which software professionals are quite familiar. Agile models promote fast development to develop high quality software. XP process model is one of the most widely used and most documented agile models. XP model is meant for small-scale projects. Since XP model is a good model, therefore there is need of its extension for the development of medium and large-scale projects. XP model has certain drawbacks such as weak documentation and poor performance while adapting it for the development of medium and large-scale projects having large teams. A new XP model is pro…
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 colla…
The increasing availability of cost-relevant data in industry allows companies to apply data-intensive estimation methods. However, available data are often inconsistent, invalid, or incomplete, so that most of the existing data-intensive estimation methods cannot be applied. Only few estimation methods can deal with imperfect data to a certain extent (e.g., Optimized Set Reduction, OSR(c)). Results from evaluating these methods in practical environments are rare. This article describes a case study on the application of OSR(c) at Toshiba Information Systems (Japan) Corporation. An important r…
This paper aims at analyzing the problems related to collaborative work using a PLM system. This research is mainly focused on the organisational aspects of SMEs involved in networks composed of large companies, subcontractors and other industrial partners. From this analysis, we propose the deployment of an approach based on an observation process of tracks generated by PLM system. The specific contributions are of two fold. First is to identify the brake points of collaborative work. The second, thanks to the exploitation of generated tracks, it allows reducing risks by reacting in real time…
Software architecture decision-making is critical to the success of a software system as software architecture sets the structure of the system, determines its qualities, and has far-reaching consequences throughout the system life cycle. The complex nature of the software development context and the importance of the problem has led the research community to develop several techniques, tools, and processes to assist software architects in making better decisions. Despite these effort, the adoption of such systematic approaches appears to be quite limited in practice. In addition, the practiti…
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…
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…
There has been a massive explosion of data generated by customers and retained by companies in the last decade. However, there is a significant mismatch between the increasing volume of data and the lack of automation methods and tools. The lack of best practices in data science programming may lead to software quality degradation, release schedule slippage, and budget overruns. To mitigate these concerns, we would like to bring software engineering best practices into data science. Specifically, we focus on automated data validation in the data preparation phase of the software development li…
It has been 50 years since the term software engineering was coined in 1968 at a NATO conference. The field should be relatively mature by now, with most established universities covering core software engineering topics in their Computer Science programs and others offering specialized degrees. However, still many practitioners lament a lack of skills in new software engineering hires. With the growing demand for software engineers from the industry, this apparent gap becomes more and more pronounced. One corporate strategy to address this gap is for the industry to develop supplementary trai…
University of Gothenburg（哥德堡大学）；Radboud University Nijmegen（拉德堡德大学）；University of Bergamo（贝加莫大学）
Robots that support humans by performing useful tasks (a.k.a., service robots) are booming worldwide. In contrast to industrial robots, the development of service robots comes with severe software engineering challenges, since they require high levels of robustness and autonomy to operate in highly heterogeneous environments. As a domain with critical safety implications, service robotics faces a need for sound software development practices. In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study to assess the state of the art and practice of robotics software engineering. We conducte…
