Background: Modern workplaces have irreversibly changed their attitudes toward remote working, allowing different degrees of remotely working. Decisions about the influence of restricted remote working and mandatory office presence often raise the question of disproportional impact on different genders.

Aim: Our aim is to achieve a better understanding of whether WFH has a gender-segregated motivation and what other factors predict individual choices to work onsite or remotely.

Method: We report results from a company-wide survey conducted in NorBank, a Norwegian fintech company. The data is analyzed using descriptive statistics, contingency tables, Chi-Square test of association along with post hoc tests. We illustrated the results by using diverged chart bars.

Results: The results show that gender differences among software engineers are negligible and insignificant. Further, software engineers work more remotely than employees in other departments. We also found that engineers without managerial responsibilities are less at the office, and those who live further to their job, tend to work more remotely. With respect to preferences to work remotely, we found that younger engineers choose to work at the office more often than the senior engineers.

Conclusions: We found that the strongest predictor of the degree of remote working is not the gender but commute time and role. This also means that any analysis of general populations (as the analysis of all employees at NorBank) shall be approached with care because it may lead to flawed conclusions due to the different distributions of gender and roles in different departments. 

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 productivity. But despite its importance, the predictors and outcomes of software engineers' well-being as a multidimensional construct to date are under-researched. This paper reports on the multidimensional well-being of professional software engineers and generates insights for the future research in this area. 44 quantitative survey studies published between 2000 and 2023 were selected and synthesized both quantitatively and qualitatively through a systematic literature review. The results of the review were further analyzed to construct a quantitatively-testable theory, detailing the predictors and outcomes of well-being in software engineering organizations. The total number of research participants included in the selected studies is 16,086 software engineering professionals from at least 42 countries. The literature review identified various measures, constructs, and indicators of well-being, as well as its predictors and outcomes. The theory, based on cumulative results of carefully selected quantitative studies, is an attempt to "correct the record" by establishing well-being in software engineering as a meta-construct of hedonic, eudaimonic, and integrated or hedaimonic qualities predicted by different individual, team and organizational factors and impacting the functioning of software engineers and their organizations. The review highlighted the under-researched aspects of well-being in software engineering and confirmed the need for more advanced quantitative studies. We hope that the theory will benefit researchers in conducting future studies and practitioners in developing nuanced and science-based interventions for improving software engineers' well-being.

We examine how remote work is institutionalized in eight companies, and solicit employees' needs at the workplace. Based on these insights, we summarize actionable advice for policy makers, facility managers and employees to promote on-site work, which is likely to help many companies to rejuvenate life in their offices.

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.

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)