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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, ...
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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. Furthermore, the subject of sustainable growth with respect to organizational capabilities and culture is often overlooked. This paper reports findings from an exploratory multi-case study of two large onboarding campaigns. We collected empirical data from interviews, retrospectives, onboarding documentation and onsite visits. Based on the empirical study, onboarding hundreds of software engineers in a complex agile product development environment which lacks documentation and puts high demands on engineers' knowledge and skills is a challenging and costly endeavor. To save the costs and for practical reasons, large-scale onboarding is organized in batches with the first batch trained onsite, and the later batches trained internally. We report challenges faced in the two cases and discuss possible solutions. One core finding is that a good plan combined with the organizational agility, i.e., the responsiveness to change, together with organizational maturity determined the success of organizational scaling. The presented cases contribute to the scarce research on knowledge transfer and onboarding in a large-scale agile context.
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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 chal...
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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 cultural differences. Critical analysis of related studies suggests that impeding behaviors are mostly rooted in the hierarchical culture of Indian organizations and related management behavior of command-and-control. But what happens in distributed projects with a more empowering onshore management? In this paper, we present the findings from a multiple-case study of DevOps teams with members from a mature agile company located in Sweden and a more hierarchical offshore vendor from India. Based on two focus groups we list culturally different behaviors of offshore engineers that were reported to impede agile ways of working. Furthermore, we report the findings from surveying 36 offshore team members from five DevOps teams regarding their likely behavior in situations reported to be problematic. Our findings confirm a number of previously reported behaviors rooted in cultural differences that impede the adoption of agile ways of working when collaborating with offshore engineers. At the same time, our survey results suggest that among the five surveyed teams there were teams that succeeded with the cultural integration of the offshore team members. Finally, our findings demonstrate the importance of cultural training especially when onboarding new team members.
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摘要 :
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 chal...
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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 cultural differences. Critical analysis of related studies suggests that impeding behaviors are mostly rooted in the hierarchical culture of Indian organizations and related management behavior of command-and-control. But what happens in distributed projects with a more empowering onshore management? In this paper, we present the findings from a multiple-case study of DevOps teams with members from a mature agile company located in Sweden and a more hierarchical offshore vendor from India. Based on two focus groups we list culturally different behaviors of offshore engineers that were reported to impede agile ways of working. Furthermore, we report the findings from surveying 36 offshore team members from five DevOps teams regarding their likely behavior in situations reported to be problematic. Our findings confirm a number of previously reported behaviors rooted in cultural differences that impede the adoption of agile ways of working when collaborating with offshore engineers. At the same time, our survey results suggest that among the five surveyed teams there were teams that succeeded with the cultural integration of the offshore team members. Finally, our findings demonstrate the importance of cultural training especially when onboarding new team members.
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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...
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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 distributed collaborations, we question what happened to the pair programming practice in the work-from-home mode. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of remote pair programming in two companies. We conducted 38 interviews with 30 engineers from Norway, Sweden, and the USA, and used the results of a survey in one of the case companies. Our study is unique as we collected the data longitudinally in April/May 2020, Sep/Oct 2020, and Jan/Feb 2021. We found that pair programming has decreased and some interviewees report not pairing at all for almost a full year. The experiences of those who paired vary from actively co-editing the code by using special tools to more passively co-reading and discussing the code and solutions by sharing the screen. Finally, we found that the interest in and the use of PP over time, since the first months of the forced work from home to early 2021, has admittedly increased, also as a social practice.
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摘要 :
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...
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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 distributed collaborations, we question what happened to the pair programming practice in the work-from-home mode. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of remote pair programming in two companies. We conducted 38 interviews with 30 engineers from Norway, Sweden, and the USA, and used the results of a survey in one of the case companies. Our study is unique as we collected the data longitudinally in April/May 2020, Sep/Oct 2020, and Jan/Feb 2021. We found that pair programming has decreased and some interviewees report not pairing at all for almost a full year. The experiences of those who paired vary from actively co-editing the code by using special tools to more passively co-reading and discussing the code and solutions by sharing the screen. Finally, we found that the interest in and the use of PP over time, since the first months of the forced work from home to early 2021, has admittedly increased, also as a social practice.
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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 geog...
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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 irrelevant work methods and procedures that conflict with the local interests. As Tayloristic habits are disappearing, organizations willingly or unwillingly change their decision-making approaches to enable more participation and influence from the performers. These trends are associated with the rise of participation-based parallel structures, such as quality circles, task forces or communities of practice. In this paper, we present our findings from studying corporate-level communities by the means of a multi-case study at Ericsson. We found that the main hindrances are related to the limited decision-making authority of parallel structure, member selection and achieving representation across the organizational units. Our results suggest that parallel structures highly depend on the authority of the members within their local communities, and their ability to not only channel the dialog between the units they represent and the community, but also enable the active engagement of the unit in the community studies. As such, we believe that special attention shall be put on the ambassador role of the community members.
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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 membe...
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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 challenging. At the same time, networking is one of the primary ways to share and receive knowledge and information important for developing software tasks and coordinating project activities. Objective: The purpose of this paper is to explore the actual networks of teams working in large-scale distributed software development projects and project characteristics that might impact their need for networking. Method: We conducted a multi-case study with three project cases in two companies, with software development teams as embedded units of analysis. We organized 20 individual interviews to characterize the development projects and surveyed 96 members from the total of 14 teams to draw the actual teams networks. Results: Our results show that teams in large-scale projects network in order to acquire knowledge from experts, and to coordinate tasks with other teams. We also learned that regardless of project characteristics, networking between sites in distributed projects is relatively low. Conclusions: Our study emphasizes the importance of networking. Therefore, we suggest that similar companies should pay extra attention for cultivating a networking culture in the large to strengthen their cross-site communication.
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摘要 :
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 membe...
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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 challenging. At the same time, networking is one of the primary ways to share and receive knowledge and information important for developing software tasks and coordinating project activities. Objective: The purpose of this paper is to explore the actual networks of teams working in large-scale distributed software development projects and project characteristics that might impact their need for networking. Method: We conducted a multi-case study with three project cases in two companies, with software development teams as embedded units of analysis. We organized 20 individual interviews to characterize the development projects and surveyed 96 members from the total of 14 teams to draw the actual teams networks. Results: Our results show that teams in large-scale projects network in order to acquire knowledge from experts, and to coordinate tasks with other teams. We also learned that regardless of project characteristics, networking between sites in distributed projects is relatively low. Conclusions: Our study emphasizes the importance of networking. Therefore, we suggest that similar companies should pay extra attention for cultivating a networking culture in the large to strengthen their cross-site communication.
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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 compon...
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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 and constraints of possible options. These sourcing options include: in-house, COTS, open source and outsourcing. The objective of this paper is to present an approach to support decision-makers in selecting appropriate types of origins in a specific case that maximizes the benefits of the selected business strategy. The approach consists of three descriptive models, as well as a decision process and a knowledge repository. The three models are a decision model that comprises three cornerstones (stakeholders, origins and criteria) and is based on a taxonomy for formulating decision models in this context, and two supporting models (property models and context models).
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摘要 :
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 compon...
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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 and constraints of possible options. These sourcing options include: in-house, COTS, open source and outsourcing. The objective of this paper is to present an approach to support decision-makers in selecting appropriate types of origins in a specific case that maximizes the benefits of the selected business strategy. The approach consists of three descriptive models, as well as a decision process and a knowledge repository. The three models are a decision model that comprises three cornerstones (stakeholders, origins and criteria) and is based on a taxonomy for formulating decision models in this context, and two supporting models (property models and context models).
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