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 job if forced to return to full time office work. Given these changes, companies are challenged to alter their work policies and satisfy the employee demands to retain talents. The subsequent decrease in office presence, also calls for transformations in the offices, as the free space opens up opportunities for cutting the rental costs, as well as the other expenses related to office maintenance, amenities, and perks. In this paper, we report our findings from comparing work policies in three Nordic tech and fintech companies and identify the discrepancies in the way the corporate intentions are communicated to the employees. We discuss the need for a more systematic approach to setting the goals behind a revised work policy and aligning the intensions with the company’s actions. Further, we discuss the need to resolve the inherent conflicts of interest between the individual employees (flexibility, individual productivity, and well-being) and the companies (profitability, quality of products and services, employee retention, attractiveness in the job market). © 2024, The Author(s).

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 engineering across borders.

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 regarding remote work in eight companies: Ericsson, Knowit, SpareBank 1 Utvikling, Spotify, Storebrand, Telenor, Company-X, Company-Y, and their sites in Sweden, Norway and the UK. Our findings are twofold. First, we found that companies indeed struggle with office presence and a large share of corporate space (35-67%) is underutilized. Second, we found that the main motivator for office presence is Connection and community, followed by Material offerings, Preference and Duty. Finally, we summarize actionable advice to promote onsite work, which is likely to help many other companies to rejuvenate life in their offices. IEEE

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 psychological safety. We pay special attention to work arrangements in which team members alternate days in the office with days working remotely. Our key takeaway is that psychological safety is enabled by spontaneous interaction, which is easy to facilitate in the office and hard to facilitate remotely. Our findings lead us to recommend that team members align their work modes to increase chances for spontaneous interaction in the office while benefiting from the increased focus associated with working remotely. Author

Context:Developing software-intensive products or services usually involves a plethora of software artefacts. Assets are artefacts intended to be used more than once and have value for organisations; examples include test cases, code, requirements, and documentation. During the development process, assets might degrade, affecting the effectiveness and efficiency of the development process. Therefore, assets are an investment that requires continuous management.

Identifying assets is the first step for their effective management. However, there is a lack of awareness of what assets and types of assets are common in software-developing organisations. Most types of assets are understudied, and their state of quality and how they degrade over time have not been well-understood.

Methods:We performed an analysis of secondary literature and a field study at five companies to investigate and identify assets to fill the gap in research. The results were analysed qualitatively and summarised in a taxonomy.

Results:We present the first comprehensive, structured, yet extendable taxonomy of assets, containing 57 types of assets.

Conclusions:The taxonomy serves as a foundation for identifying assets that are relevant for an organisation and enables the study of asset management and asset degradation concepts.

Competing for talents requires a conscious effort to offer an attractive workplace, which, until recently, involved increasing employee empowerment and engagement and offering opportunities for bottom-up innovation. Today, this is not sufficient, pushing tech companies to harmonize existing strategies with remote work.

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 office work can be often found anywhere on the spectrum from fully remote work to fully onsite with the hybrid working options of a varying degree in the middle. The most obvious common denominator in this situation is full flexibility, i.e., letting people decide when they want to work where. However, such one-fits-all strategy does not really fit anybody. Instead, it gives rise to several inherent conflicts of interest. In this position paper, we summarize opinions and experiences about remote work in five fictional personas as collective images based on extensive research: quantitative data, research interviews, and informal discussions with both employees and managers in tech companies, including Spotify, Ericsson, Telenor, Tieto, SONY, and many others. We conclude that increased flexibility at work leads to the conflict of individual interests of increased personal flexibility, team interest of efficient teamwork and corporate interests of preserving efficiency, company culture, and retaining the talents. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

While modern software companies strive to increase team autonomy to enable them to successfully operate the piece of software they develop and deploy, efficient ways to orchestrate the work of multiple autonomous teams working in parallel are still poorly understood. In this paper, we report how team autonomy is maintained at Spotify at scale, based on team retrospectives, interviews with team managers and archival analysis of corporate databases and work procedures. In particular, we describe how managerial authority is decentralized through various workgroups with collective authority, what compromises are made to team autonomy to ensure alignment and which team-related factors can further hinder autonomy. Our findings show that scaled autonomy at Spotify does not mean anarchy, or unlimited permissiveness. Instead, squads are expected to take responsibility for their work and coordinate, communicate and align their actions with others, and comply with a few enabling constraints. Further, squads take many decisions independently without management control or due to collective efforts that bypass formal boundary structures. Mechanisms and strategies that enable self-organization at Spotify are related to effective sharing of the codebase, achieving alignment, networking and knowledge sharing, and are described to guide other companies in their efforts to scale autonomy. © 2023 The Author(s)

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. © 2022 The Author(s)

The better-than-expected forced working from home (WFH) experiences coupled with investments enabling remote work during the pandemic motivated many employees to continue WFH occasionally, often, or entirely. Many organizations adjust their policies to increase flexibility as reported in numerous news outlets, articles, blogs, and channels dedicated to future workplace. The studies praise the flexibility given to individuals and the increase in the work-life balance but also warn about the alienation of staff members, decreased team cohesion and sense of belonging, as well as dilution of the corporate culture. This article systemizes a spectrum of emerging work arrangements for teams, including hybrid teams, partially aligned teams and, more importantly, variegated teams with fully aligned alternation of office presence. Our team typology is based on the practical insights from ‘Alpha,’ ‘InterSoft,’ Valtech, IBM, Brandwatch, and Ericsson and provides a nuanced vocabulary for organizations to start reasoning about the future work arrangements. IEEE