International Software Company Research Articles

From forced Working-From-Home to voluntary working-from-anywhere: Two revolutions in telework

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 to deliver software, if at all? This article shares our findings from monitoring the WFH during 2020 in an international software company with engineers located in Sweden, the USA, and the UK. We analyzed different aspects of productivity, such as developer job satisfaction and well-being, activity, communication and collaboration, efficiency and flow based on the archives of commit data, calendar invites, Slack communication, the internal reports of WFH experiences, and 30 interviews carried out in April/May and September 2020. We add more objective evidence to the existing COVID-19 studies the vast majority of which are based on self-reported productivity from the early months of the pandemic. We find that engineers continue committing code and carrying out their daily duties, as their routines adjust to “the new norm”. Our key message is that software engineers can work from home and quickly adjust their tactical approaches to the changes of unprecedented scale. Further, WFH has its benefits, including better work-life balance, improved flow, and improved quality of distributed meetings and events. Yet, WFH is not challenge free: not everybody feels equally productive working from home, work hours for many increased, while physical activity, socialization, pairing and opportunities to connect to unfamiliar colleagues decreased. Information sharing and meeting patterns also changed. Finally, experiences gained during the pandemic will have a lasting impact on the future of the workplace. The results of an internal company-wide survey suggest that only 9% of engineers will return to work in the office full time. Our article concludes with the InterSoft’s strategy for work from anywhere (WFX), and a list of useful adjustments for a better WFH.

A Framework for Agile Global Software Development: The Case of an International Software Company in Egypt

Objectives: Presenting the results of an Egyptian branch of an international company as a case study. The existing gap in the knowledge types and the impact of the lack interaction was investigated within the structure of the company team. Methods: This study is an exploratory case study. To enhance the data collection process and to answer the study’ questions, the following three phases were performed: interviews, online survey, and interviews. A descriptive statistical analysis and root – cause analysis were used to analyze the online survey in quantitative and qualitative attributes and a general framework coding for a thematic analysis to analyze the interviews. Finding: The results explore that: (1) the current structure of the Egyptian branch of an international company case study distributed teams faces an existing gap in the knowledge types (domain, technical, and application). (2) The existing gap in both of domain and technical knowledge leads to a gap in the application knowledge. (3) The lack of using qualified document, recording audio and video meetings between the distributed teams, Co-located practice, wikis (asynchronous tool) besides email, and the yearly planned formal training and training course create root causes for the existing knowledge gap. (4) Qualified document is standardized and contains the both test cases and user stories. (5) Recording audio and video meetings between the distributed teams especially in complex project is an excellent feedback. (6) The strategy of the Co-located practice, where the designers (offshore members) travel to collocate with Client engagement team (onshore team) during the requirements document preparing, is preferred by the most participants than the opposite. Application/Improvement: Capturing the existing gap in knowledge types for the agile partial offshoring model will lead to improving this model. Which increase the software quality and decrease delivery time and cost for international software development companies and software development’ clients. Keywords: AGSD, Communication, Coordination, Distributed Teams, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Types

On the interest of architectural technical debt: Uncovering the contagious debt phenomenon

AbstractA known problem in large software companies is to balance the prioritization of short‐term and long‐term business goals. As an example, architecture suboptimality (Architectural Technical Debt), incurred to deliver fast, might hinder future feature development. However, some technical debt generates more interest to be paid than other. We conducted a multi‐phase, multiple‐case embedded case study comprehending 9 sites at 6 large international software companies. We have investigated which architectural technical debt items generate more interest , how the interest occurs during software development and which costly extra‐activities are triggered as a result. We presented a taxonomy of the most dangerous items identified during the qualitative investigation and a model of their effects that can be used for prioritization, for further investigation and as a quality model for extracting more precise and context‐specific metrics. We found that some architectural technical debt items are contagious, causing the interest to be not only fixed, but potentially compound, which leads to the hidden growth of interest (possibly exponential). We found important factors to be monitored to refactor the debt before it becomes too costly. Instances of these phenomena need to be identified and stopped before the development reaches a crises.

Using Project-Based-Learning in a mobile application development course—An experience report

In this paper, we report the experience gained in a Mobile Application Development course. We involved students in Computer Science at the University of Salerno, who in teams had to conduct a project. The goal of this project was to design and develop applications (or simply app) for Android-based devices. The adopted teaching approach was based on Project-Based-Learning and enhanced collaboration and competition. Collaboration took place among members of the same team (intra-team), while competition among different teams of students (extra-team). To allow intra-team collaboration, students used GitHub as Computer-Supported-Collaborative-Learning tool. It provided support for implicit and explicit communication among members in each team and for distributed revision control and management of software artifacts (e.g., source code and requirements models). Developed apps underwent a final public competition prized by IT managers of national and international software companies. This is how we implemented extra-team competition. IT managers expressed a positive judgment on both students׳ competition and developed apps. Also, students provided very good feedback on used teaching approach and support GitHub provided.

Industry Watch

Suppose you're a corporate vice president at a well-known international software company, and you want to check on the visibility of one of your leading researchers in the outside world. You're sitting at your desk, so the most obvious thing to do is to enter their name into a search engine. If the well-known international software company happened to be Microsoft, and if the leading researcher happened to be Microsoft's Susan Dumais, and if the search engine you decided to use happened to be Google, you might be surprised to find that the sponsored link that comes atop the search results is actually from Google itself, exhorting you to ‘Work on NLP at Google’, and alerting you to the fact that ‘Google is hiring experts in statistical language processing’.

A design for futurizing knowledge networking

This paper reviews theories and concepts about how to increase the value of knowledge in an organization. It outlines developments in the area of advanced people and knowledge management networks by Meta4, an international software company that has developed a unique knowledge management platform called KnowNet (or Knowledge Network). The paper describes a knowledge management application of KnowNet and Web technology at Skandia. Skandia’s system, known as KenNet, was developed as an IT‐based knowledge network to enable organizations to utilize the knowledge and ideas of individuals. The KenNet was designed uniquely to augment the activity of Skandia’s concept of “futurizing”.

Analyzing an industry in change: the Irish software manual printing industry

This article is concerned with the application in a case study of three inter‐related theoretical issues: new perspectives on technological change, learning organizations, and the question of market versus hierarchy in the relationships between firms. The case study is of the software manual printing industry in Ireland, and its relationship with the major, international software companies.