Context: Pair programming (PP) is more relevant than ever. As modern systems grow in complexity, knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams have become essential. However, despite well-documented benefits of PP, its adoption remains inconsistent across software teams.

Objective: This study aims to understand the factors that facilitate or hinder team members' adoption as well as lasting engagement in PP.

Method: We have conducted an exploratory single-case study in a mature agile company in Norway. We collected data through two rounds of interviews with team members in different roles and performed a thematic analysis of the interviews.

Results: Our key finding is that multiple factors, related to the perceptions of how PP contributes to daily work, social dynamics and learning, efforts associated with engaging in PP sessions, company and team attitudes, resources, infrastructure, and task characteristics, affect PP engagement.

Conclusion: Long-term engagement in PP requires expected benefits with the practice being confirmed in firsthand experiences. Adapting the practice to each unique team, with insights drawn from collective learning, is also beneficial. Our findings will be beneficial for software practitioners seeking to make PP an integrated part of their team's workflow.

In the postpandemic era, attitudes toward remote work appeared to undergo a lasting transformation, with a high degree of location flexibility becoming increasingly common. Yet, in recent years, many organizations have introduced return-to-office (RTO) initiatives aimed at re-establishing traditional workplace dynamics and prioritizing in-person collaboration. These mandates have drawn significant attention and criticism for limiting software developers flexibility, diminishing well-being, and potentially impacting women disproportionally. This study seeks to understand software developers preferences and actual work behaviors in companies that promote in-office presence. Specifically, we investigate whether certain demographic groups, including women, are differentially affected by RTO initiatives. We also explore a range of factors that may influence individual preferences for remote or on-site work, beyond gender-based assumptions. We report findings from a survey conducted in two large Scandinavian companies engaged in the development of software-intensive systems and services. Data analysis includes descriptive statistics, contingency tables along with post hoc tests, chi-square test of association, and Cramér's (Formula presented.) for effect sizes. Our findings reveal that gender differences among software developers in both industrial cases are minimal and statistically insignificant. Instead, other variables—such as the degree of collaborative work, commute time, and responsibility to support teammates—demonstrate a stronger association with both actual and preferred office attendance. Our results challenge common narratives around gendered responses to RTO mandates, suggesting that other contextual and task-related factors may play a more decisive role. While the impact of RTO initiatives should not be dismissed, our findings indicate that a deeper understanding of work dynamics—particularly around collaboration intensity and commuting burden—is essential to designing equitable and effective work policies. Finally, our findings imply that organizational recommendations for work location must go hand in hand with task design. 

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 survey at Storebrand - a large-scale Norwegian fintech company, focusing on perceived performance. Our analysis of 192 responses shows that most employees report being able to perform the planned tasks. Further, half of respondents perceive to have increased work hours. Through qualitative analysis of open-ended commentaries of respondents we learned that remote working has dual effects on the perceived work hours - some employees report working longer hours and others report having more work time due to efficient use of the time throughout the day. Finally, we recommend managers to discuss and address the concerning habits of employees caused by increased connectivity and inability to stop working, before these lead to burnout and disturbances in the work/life balance. 

Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) is widely adopted in the industry, integrating practices such as Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). Beyond technical aspects, CSE also encompasses business activities like continuous planning, budgeting, and operational processes. Coordinating these activities in large-scale product development involves multiple stakeholders, increasing complexity. This study aims to address this complexity by identifying and analyzing critical dependencies in large-scale CSE. Based on 17 semi-structured interviews conducted at two Nordic fintech companies, our preliminary findings indicate that dependencies between software teams and support functions, as well as between software teams and external entities, are the primary sources of delays and bottlenecks. As a next step, we plan to further refine our understanding of critical dependencies in large-scale CSE and explore coordination mechanisms that can better support software development teams in managing these challenges. 

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. 

Context: Organizations opt for continuous delivery of incremental updates to deal with uncertainty and minimize waste. However, applying continuous engineering (CSE) practices requires a continuous feedback loop with input from customers and end-users.

Challenges: It becomes increasingly challenging to apply traditional requirements elicitation and validation techniques with ever-shrinking software delivery cycles. At the same time, frequent deliveries generate an abundance of usage data and telemetry informing engineering teams of end-user behavior. The literature describing how practitioners work with user feedback in CSE, is limited.

Objectives: We aim to explore the state of practice related to utilization of user feedback in CSE. Specifically, what practices are used, how, and the shortcomings of these practices.

Method: We conduct a qualitative survey and report analysis from 21 interviews in 13 product development companies. We apply thematic and cross-case analysis to interpret the data. Results: Based on our earlier work we suggest a conceptual model of how user feedback is utilized in CSE. We further report the identified challenges with the continuous collection and analysis of user feedback and identify implications for practice.

Conclusions: Companies use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to infer end-user preferences. At the same time, continuous collection, analysis, interpretation, and use of data in decisions are problematic. The challenges pertain to selecting the right metrics and analysis techniques, resource allocation, and difficulties in accessing vaguely defined user groups. Our advice to practitioners in CSE is to ensure sufficient resources and effort for interpretation of the feedback, which can be facilitated by telemetry dashboards. 

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

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 when things go wrong. As many companies announced their post-COVID permanent remote-work or hybrid home/office policies, the question of what can be expected from software engineers who work from home becomes more and more relevant. Aims: To understand the nature of home telework we analyze the evidence of perceived changes in productivity comparing office work before the pandemic with the work from home during the pandemic from thirteen empirical surveys of practitioners. Method: We analyzed data from six corporate surveys conducted in four Scandinavian companies combined with the results of seven published surveys studying the perceived changes in productivity in industrial settings. In addition, we sought explanations for the variation in perceived productivity among the engineers from the studied companies through the qualitative analysis of open-ended questions and interviews. Results: Combined results of 7686 data points suggest that though on average perceived productivity has not changed significantly, there are developers who report being more productive, and developers being less productive when working from home. Positively affected individuals in some surveys form large groups of respondents (up to 50%) and mention benefiting from a better organization of work, increased flexibility and focus. Yet, there are equally large groups of negatively affected respondents (up to 51%) who complain about the challenges related to remote teamwork and collaboration, as well as emotional issues, distractions and poor home office environment and equipment. Finally, positive trends are found in longitudinal surveys, i.e., developers’ productivity in the later months of the pandemic show better results than those in the earlier months. Conclusions: We conclude that behind the average “no change” lays a large variation of experiences, which means that the work from home might not be for everyone. Yet, a longitudinal analysis of the surveys is encouraging, as it shows that the more pessimistic results might be influenced by the initial experiences of an unprecedented crisis. At the end, we put forward the lessons learned during the pandemic that can inspire the new post-pandemic work policies. © 2021 The Authors

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 at home, coined as hybrid or flexible working arrangements. As a result, offices remain empty, managers are confused, and organizational leaders do not know what to do with the often-expensive rental contracts. In this short paper, we investigate the employee presence in the offices in two software companies and dive deeper into the reasons behind the preferences to work remotely, and practices that help to attract employees back into the offices. The latter are based on the qualitative analysis of interviews and survey responses. Our findings suggest that between the fall of 2021 and the summer of 2022, the offices were half-empty and that, on average, the daily office presence varies between 13–30%. The peaks of office presence in both companies are on Wednesdays, reaching up to 50% during weeks with low virus spread in one company, and in the spring months in 2022 in the other company. The reasons for remote work include behavioral and practical motivations, factors related to office equipment and facilities, and the nature of the work tasks. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

In recent years, more attention has been given to internal software startups in practice and in research alike, yet the concept is not fully understood. Nor is it clear whether or not it significantly differs from stand-alone software startup, and if yes, then how. In this position paper, we propose to conceptualize internal software startups as a hybrid of two related concepts: stand-alone software startup and internal corporate venture (ICV). We derive characteristics of the both concepts from the earlier literature and use our previous research on internal software startups to uncover the differences and the similarities across the three concepts. © 2022, The Author(s).