Darja Smite

Blekinge Institute of Technology | BTH

Work in software development companies has become increasingly hybrid with employees altering days of working in the office with days of working remotely from home. Yet, little is know about the efficiency of such way of working because the current scale of remote working is unprecedented. In this paper, we present our findings from a company-wide...

For decades, software engineering research and practice has focused primarily on technological and process-related factors. Today, there is a growing interest in organizational, social, and psychological factors, including well-being. Organizational studies show that well-being contributes to work outcomes, including creativity, performance, and pr...

Although the public health emergency related to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has officially ended, many software developers still work partly from home. Agile teams that coordinate their office time foster a sense of unity, collaboration, and cohesion among team members. In contrast, teams with limited co-presence may experience...

COVID-19 pandemic has irreversibly changed the attitude towards office presence. While previously remote workers were met with skepticism and distrust, today the same applies to companies prohibiting remote working. Albeit many workspaces are half empty. In this paper, we offer insights into the role of the office, corporate policies and actions re...

After the long period of forced work from home, many knowledge workers have not only developed a strong habit of remote work, but also consider flexibility as their personal right and no longer as a privilege. Existing research suggest that the majority prefers to work two or three days per week from home and are likely to quit or search for a new...

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">The tech industry increasingly focuses on how to attract talents, which is in dire demand. It is also one of the most volatile industries, with many flagship companies eager to experiment and advance their organizational structures, work methods and, no...

Onboarding is a process of organizational socialization of the new hires, that includes recruitment, orientation, training, coaching and support. While onboarding individuals into an organization is a rather straightforward task, little is known about 1) onboarding hundreds of developers and 2) doing it on a distance in outsourcing situations. Furt...

One clear legacy from the COVID-19 pandemic is the widespread adoption of remote work and flexible work arrangements, especially in tech companies. However, the practicability of remote working has raised a significant debate. The preferences for remote work vary greatly even among the employees of the same company. Individual wishes for remote vs...

The engineering of complex software systems is often the result of a highly collaborative effort. However, collaboration within a multinational enterprise has an overlooked legal implication when developers collaborate across national borders: It is taxable. In this short article, we discuss the unsolved problem of taxing collaborative software eng...

While modern software companies strive to increase team autonomy to enable them to successfullyoperate the piece of software they develop and deploy, efficient ways to orchestrate the work ofmultiple autonomous teams working in parallel are still poorly understood. In this paper, we reporthow team autonomy is maintained at Spotify at scale, based o...

The engineering of complex software systems is often the result of a highly collaborative effort. However, collaboration within a multinational enterprise has an overlooked legal implication when developers collaborate across national borders: It is taxable. In this article, we discuss the unsolved problem of taxing collaborative software engineeri...

Although the forced working from home during the pandemic crisis seem to have ended, 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...

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 experimenting w...

Background: Modern code review is expected to facilitate knowledge sharing: All relevant information, the collective expertise, and meta-information around the code change and its context become evident, transparent, and explicit in the corresponding code review discussion. The discussion participants can leverage this information in the following...

The COVID-19 outbreak has admittedly caused interruptions to production, transportation, and mobility, therefore, having a significant impact on the global supply and demand chain’s well-functioning. But what happened to companies developing digital services, such as software? How has the enforced Working-From-Home (WFH) mode impacted their ability...

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 wit...

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...

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 exper...

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 investigate...

Psychological safety is a precondition for learning and success in software teams. But what happens to psychological safety when work becomes remote? In this article, we explore how Norwegian software developers experienced remote work under the pandemic and after restrictions were waved and describe simple behaviors and attitudes related to psycho...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a natural experiment of an unprecedented scale as companies closed their offices and sent employees to work from home. Many managers were concerned that their engineers would not be able to work effectively from home, or lack the motivation to do so, and that they would lose control and not even notice whe...

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 large-scale agile organizations to achieve increased employee wellbeing as...

Agile methods and the related concepts of employee empowerment, self-management, and autonomy have reached large-scale software organizations and raise questions about commonly adopted principles for authority distribution. However, the optimum mechanism to balance the need for alignment, quality, and process control with the need or willingness of...

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 i...

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 curat...

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 i...

Context: Agile methods in offshored projects have become increasingly popular. Yet, many companies have found that the use of agile methods in coordination with companies located outside the regions of early agile adopters remains challenging. India has received particular attention as the leading destination of offshoring contracts due to signific...

Context: Developing software-intensive products or services involves utilising many artefacts that are either part of the offering or part of enabling their development. These artefacts, if valuable and used more than once by the development organisation, can be seen as assets such as test cases, code, requirements, and documentation. As such, asse...

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...

Code evolution, whether related to the development of new features, bug fixing, or refactoring, inevitably changes the quality of the code. One particular type of such change is the accumulation of Technical Debt (TD) resulting from sub-optimal design decisions. Traditionally, refactoring is one of the means that has been acknowledged to help to ke...

Offshore outsourcing is a common way of working, but sourcing collaborations do not always last, and sometimes vendors are switched. Vendor switching results in a complex form of relationship, in which the competing outgoing and incoming vendors are expected to cooperate. The success of such transitions highly depends on successful knowledge transf...

High-quality work is said to depend on team abilities. However, teams working in large-scale projects often do not have all expertise to complete their tasks, which are also highly interdependent. Therefore, teams need to rely on coordination with other teams, experts, and supporting roles. In this paper, we explore teams' coordination needs and ev...

The combination of scale and distribution in software projects makes the onboarding of new developers problematic. To the best of our knowledge, there is no research on the relationship between onboarding strategies and the performance evolution of newcomers in large-scale, globally distributed projects. Furthermore, there are no approaches to supp...

With the growing interest of adopting agile methods in offshored process, many companies realized that the use of agile methods and practices in companies located outside the location of early adopters of agile methods may be challenging. India, the main destination of offshoring contracts, have received particular attention, due to the big cultura...

When the value increases engagement, engagement increases the value.

Large-scale distributed software projects with longlife cycles often involve a considerable amount of complex legacycode. The combination of scale and distribution challenges and the difficulty in acquiring knowledge about massive amounts of complex legacy code may make the onboarding of new developers/teams problematic. These problems may lead to...

Organizational management traditionally has taken care of all the important strategy, structure, and work-design decisions, as well as most of the ongoing decisions about work procedures. In large-scale corporations with many geographically distributed sites and high divisional detachment, such strategies are yet doomed to result in implementing ir...

The new generation of software companies has revolutionized the way companies are designed. While bottom-up governance and team autonomy improve motivation, performance, and innovation, managing agile development at scale is a challenge. We describe how Spotify cultivates guilds to help the company share knowledge, align, and make collective decisi...

Global software engineering has changed the way software is developed today. To address the new challenges, many universities have launched specially tailored courses to train young professionals to work in globally distributed projects. However, a mere acknowledgment of the geographic, temporal, and cultural differences does not necessarily lead t...

While offshore software development is frequently looked at in simple economic terms, assumed benefits are not always achieved. This can be attributed to unexpectedly high transition costs and a number of extra costs for maintaining a sourcing strategy. When offshoring fails, companies need to revisit their decision. In this paper, an analytical mo...

Staffing software projects with engineers from best-cost locations has become a commonality. However, distributed development is proved to be very challenging with many referenced problems, such as low productivity and quality, and high extra costs. One main reason for many challenges that is often overlooked is high employee turnover. In developin...

Context: Networking in a distributed large-scale project is complex because of many reasons: time zone problems can make it challenging to reach remote contacts, teams rarely meet face-to-face which means that remote project members are often unfamiliar with each other, and applying activities for growing the network across sites is also challengin...

Background: Employee turnover in GSD is an extremely important issue, especially in Western companies offshoring to emerging nations. Aims: In this case study we investigated an offshore vendor company and in particular whether the employees' retention is related with their experience. Moreover, we studied whether we can identify a threshold associ...

Onboarding is the process of supporting new employees regarding their social and performance adjustment to their new job. Software companies have faced challenges with recruitment and onboarding of new team members, and there is no study that investigates it in a holistic way. In this paper, we conducted a multi-case study to investigate the onboar...

Selecting sourcing options for software assets and components is an important process that helps companies to gain and keep their competitive advantage. The sourcing options include: in-house, COTS, open source and outsourcing. The objective of this paper is to further refine, extend and validate a solution presented in our previous work. The refin...

Offshoring software development activities to a remote site in another country continues to be one of the key strategies to save development cost. However, the assumed economic benefits of offshoring are often questionable, due to a large number of hidden costs and too simple cost calculations. This study is a continuation of our work on calculatin...

At present, agile development is a dominating development process in software engineering. Yet, due to different contexts, also agile methods require adaptations (e.g. Scrum-but). Since adaptation means adding, modifying or dropping some agile elements, it is important to know what the effects and importance of these elements are. Given the weak st...

Large software development projects involve multiple interconnected teams, often spread around the world, developing complex products for a growing number of customers and users. Succeeding with large-scale software development requires access to an enormous amount of knowledge and skills. Since neither individuals nor teams can possibly possess al...

Software architects are key assets for successful development projects. However, not much research has investigated the challenges they face in large-scale distributed projects. So, researchers investigated how architects at Ericsson were organized, their roles and responsibilities, and the effort they spent guarding and governing a large-scale leg...

Background: Developers and development teams in large-scale software development are often required to learn continuously. Organizations also face the need to train and support new developers and teams on-boarded in ongoing projects. Although learning is associated with performance improvements, experience shows that training and learning does not...

Context: Global software development (GSD) projects can have distributed teams that work independently in different locations or team members that are dispersed. The various development settings in GSD can influence quality during product evolution. When evaluating quality using defects as a proxy, the development settings have to be taken into con...

Companies developing software are constantly striving to gain or keep their competitive advantage on the market. To do so, they should balance what to develop themselves and what to get from elsewhere, which may be software components or software services. These strategic decisions need to be aligned with business objectives and the capabilities an...

Background: Agile development heavily relies on effective communication and coordination. Large-scale software development, where many teams are involved in developing often complex projects - even more so. As projects grow more complex, there is a finite limit to the amount of information that one person or a team within that project can possess a...

Context: Offshore outsourcing collaborations can result in distributed development, which has been linked to quality-related concerns. However, there are few studies that focus on the implication of distributed development on quality, and they report inconsistent findings using different proxies for quality. Thus, there is a need for more studies,...

Agile software development has become well known to the community and is nowadays frequently used for the development of different kinds of software systems. Agile methods are widely spread and often adapted to the context-specific needs. The adaptations constitute reductions and/or extensions of agile practices. Yet, we have limited knowledge abou...

There exists no generally accepted theory in software engineering, and at the same time a scientific discipline needs theories. Some laws, hypotheses and conjectures exist, but yet no generally accepted theory. Several researchers and initiatives emphasize the need for theory in the discipline. The objective of this paper is to formulate a theory o...

Knowledge management (KM) is essential for success in any software project, but especially in global software development where team members are separated by time and space. Software organizations are managing knowledge in various ways to increase transparency and improve software team performance. One way to classify these strategies is proposed b...

Researchers examined published studies of global software engineering to determine whether offshoring actually yielded cost savings. Not enough evidence existed to reach the verdict that offshoring reduced costs.

Most companies have learned that cost calculations for offshore outsourcing shouldn't be limited to hourly wages. Looking at salaries alone, you could naively hope for cost reductions of up to 90 percent. However, don't underestimate the cost of knowledge transfer, travel, attrition, miscommunication, and so on. But does an opportunity for cost red...

Over the past decades, today, and in the future, business contexts in software organizations and the common ways of developing software are changing dramatically. Formation of teams in distributed environments, virtual or not, calls for new ways of working across geographic, temporal, and cultural boundaries. This, however, also requires effective...

Context: In large-scale distributed software projects the expertise may be scattered across multiple locations. Goal: We describe and discuss a large-scale distributed agile project at Ericsson, a multinational telecommunications company headquartered in Sweden. The project is distributed across four development locations (one in Sweden, one in Kor...

There is a plethora of studies investigating object-oriented measures and their link with external quality attributes, but usefulness of the measures may differ across empirical studies. This study aims to aggregate and identify useful object-oriented measures, specifically those obtainable from the source code of object-oriented systems that have...

This chapter is dedicated to companies engaged in collaborative software projects with staff distributed across several locations. The chapter is organized around ten problem areas. Each problem area starts with a common misconception, followed by a discussion of complexities associated with distributed development as opposed to co-located developm...

Many organizations nowadays strive for utilization of benefits offered by global software engineering (GSE) and sourcing strategies are thus discussed more often. Since there are so many variations of the attributes associated with global software projects a large amount of new terms has been introduced. The diversity in sourcing jargon however has...

Software is increasingly developed in global projects, and such projects are challenged by distance, different time zones, and cultural differences. Knowledge management is central to ensuring effective development of a product with the right features and the right level of quality. A central question then is what knowledge management approach to a...

The link between maintenance and product quality, as well as the high cost of software maintenance, highlights the importance of efficient maintenance processes. Sustaining maintenance work efficiency in a global software development setting that involves a transfer is a challenging endeavor. Studies report on the negative effect of transfers on ef...

Nowadays many software development companies have become global and employ people in different sites around the world. It is common that long-term maintenance software development projects at their later stages migrate to the cheaper sites, while product management and control is performed at a distance. This, however, has one important implication...

Conway's law assumes a strong association between the system's architecture and the organization's communication structure that designs it. In the light of contemporary software development, when many companies rely on geographically distributed teams, which often turn out to be temporarily composed and thus having an often-changing communication s...

Offshore software development has gained momentum and most of software companies today have implemented offshore strategies of some sort. Many of these strategies are enforced by corporate top management and driven by assumptions that lower development wages guarantee cheaper and better software development. In practice, offshore software developme...

Most large software companies are involved in offshore development, now small- and medium-sized companies are starting to undertake global sourcing too. Empirical research suggests that offshoring is not always successful; however, only a few comprehensive failure stories have been reported. The objective of our study has been to understand why sma...

Knowledge management (KM) is key to the success of any software organization. KM in software development has been the center of attention for researchers due to its potential to improve productivity. However, the knowledge is not only stored in repositories but is also shared in the office space. Agile software development teams use the benefits of...

Developing and maintaining team awareness within and across teams working in the same project helps team members in aligning their activities and facilitates implicit coordination. This requires both task and presence awareness. In this paper, we share our findings from a survey in which we measured the level of team awareness in cross-team collabo...

A variety of new forms of business are enabled through globalization and practiced by software organizations today. While companies go global to reduce their development costs, access a larger pool of resources and explore new markets, it is often assumed that the level of delivered services shall remain the same after implementing the sourcing dec...

http://www.xp2013.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/4_xp2013-large-scale-smite_turhan_abstract.pdf In this extended abstract we introduce and briefly discuss key challenges that possess threats to validity of empirical studies conducted within the context of distributed agile software development in the large scale. These challenges are based on our o...

Many companies have development sites around the globe. This inevitably means that development work may be transferred between the sites. This paper defines a classification of software transfer types, it divides transfers into three main types: full, partial and gradual transfers to describe the context of a transfer. The differences between trans...

SUMMARY Globalization has influenced the way software is developed today, and many software organizations have started to actively utilize resources from around the world. However, these endeavors are recognized as very challenging, and they have attracted a lot of attention in software research in the past decade. Unlike many other research initia...

In the times of increased global competition, software companies are forced to search for more effective development practices and often team up with onshore and offshore partners to develop faster and better products. In this paper we empirically explore a highly distributed onshore development project with a complex coordination structure. Our fi...

Awareness and shared knowledge are important ingredients of successful coordination in software engineering projects, and especially when team members are distributed. Although various coordination mechanisms and knowledge sharing recommendations for cross-site collaboration have been proposed, spreading awareness among distributed team members in...