Janne Järvinen

What are Hackathons for

A swift execution from idea to market has become a key competitive advantage for software companies to enable them to survive and grow in turbulent business environments. To combat this challenge, companies are using hackathons. A hackathon is a highly engaging, continuous event in which people in small groups produce working software prototypes in a limited amount of time. F-Secure, a software product company, views hackathons as a possible solution to the fundamental business problem of how to make revenue from an idea, spanning the phases from creating the idea to producing a software prototype. However, hackathons pose the challenge of how to transform those promising prototypes into finalized products that create revenue and real business value.

Challenges to IS quality

Abstract Investing in quality was popular in the early 1990s. Several approaches were developed, but it seems that none of them provides a solution that is generally accepted and adequately detailed for both scientific and practical purposes within the IS field. We claim that most quality approaches concentrate too much on the technical and control oriented aspects of managing quality thus causing unsatisfactory results. There is a need and a demand for better quality practice that can be attained through cooperation between practitioners and researchers. This paper discusses these challenges to IS quality and presents some suggestions for bridging the gap.

From Agile Software Development to Mercury Business

The rapid downfall of the Nokia software ecosystem has radically altered the landscape of software industry in Finland in recent years. There has been a shift from largely corporate driven way of working, which is often dominant in large companies, to more agile practices, and in general software organizations are seeking new, leaner ways of composing, delivering, and using software also inside already established companies. To accelerate this transformation in large scale, a collaborative research program has been created, called Need for Speed (N4S). In this paper, we give an insight to the joint goals and concrete actions of the program and discuss the motivations of individual companies that are participating in the program. As one concrete goal of the project, we introduce the concept of Mercury business, where the principles of the Lean startup framework are applied in a more conventional industrial setting.

On integrating assessment and measurement: towards continuous assessment of software engineering processes

Goal-driven measurement and software process assessment are established technologies and are used extensively in the software industry to facilitate process improvement. Usually, these are activities performed by separate measurement and assessment experts with little mutual co-operation. In the PROFES research project, measurement and assessment have been successfully integrated to save costs and seek synergies. In this paper, we describe these integration possibilities and identify their limitations, with a focus on continuous assessment using ISO 15504 as a background reference model for software processes. As a practical example, we present Tokheims experience of establishing and using the continuous assessment approach in extending their measurement programme on the system testing process of the Omega system.

Operational release planning in large-scale Scrum with multiple stakeholders – A longitudinal case study at F-Secure Corporation

Abstract Context The analysis and selection of requirements are important parts of any release planning process. Previous studies on release planning have focused on plan-driven optimization models. Unfortunately, solving the release planning problem mechanistically is difficult in an agile development context. Objective We describe how a release planning method was employed in two case projects in F-Secure, a large Finnish software company. We identify the benefits which the projects gained from the method, and analyze challenges in the cases and improvements made to the method during the case projects. Method We observed five release planning events and four retrospectives and we conducted surveys in the first two events. We conducted six post-project interviews. We conjoined the observation notes, survey results and interviews and analyzed them qualitatively and quantitatively. Results The focal point of the method was release planning events where the whole project organization gathered to plan the next release. The planning was conducted by the development teams in close collaboration with each other and with the other stakeholders. We identified ten benefits which included improved communication, transparency, dependency management and decision making. We identified nine challenges which included the lacking preparation and prioritization of requirements, unrealistic schedules, insufficient architectural planning and lacking agile mindset. The biggest improvements to the method were the introduction of frequent status checks and a big visible planning status board. Conclusion The release planning method ameliorated many difficult characteristics of the release planning problem but its efficiency was negatively affected by the performing organization that was in transition from a plan-driven to an agile development mindset. Even in this case the benefits clearly outweighed the challenges and the method enabled the early identification of the issues in the project.

Industrial Experiences of Organizing a Hackathon to Assess a Device-centric Cloud Ecosystem

A hackathon (hacking marathon) is an event to innovate and develop prototypes, typically lasting at most a few days. Despite several innovations having been reported resulting from hackathons and the increasing popularity of hackathons, results about, organizing of, and experiences regarding hackathons have been scarcely reported. We studied a hackathon as a means to assess a device-centric cloud ecosystem in industrial settings. We provide a descriptive account of a three-days hackathon. The experience was that the hackathon was realistic as well as an efficient and effective assessment of the requirements and design of the ecosystem, providing guidance for future development. We also summarize the lessons learned about successfully organizing a hackathon. The results also highlight encouraging experience about the hackathon among the participants in terms of the social benefits, such as collaboration, inspiration, and work motivation, resulting in repeating hackathons for various purposes in the near future. In general, the results indicate a hackathon as a promising new approach in software engineering, where speed of development is becoming essential.

An industry experiment on the effects of test-driven development on external quality and productivity

Existing empirical studies on test-driven development (TDD) report different conclusions about its effects on quality and productivity. Very few of those studies are experiments conducted with software professionals in industry. We aim to analyse the effects of TDD on the external quality of the work done and the productivity of developers in an industrial setting. We conducted an experiment with 24 professionals from three different sites of a software organization. We chose a repeated-measures design, and asked subjects to implement TDD and incremental test last development (ITLD) in two simple tasks and a realistic application close to real-life complexity. To analyse our findings, we applied a repeated-measures general linear model procedure and a linear mixed effects procedure. We did not observe a statistical difference between the quality of the work done by subjects in both treatments. We observed that the subjects are more productive when they implement TDD on a simple task compared to ITLD, but the productivity drops significantly when applying TDD to a complex brownfield task. So, the task complexity significantly obscured the effect of TDD. Further evidence is necessary to conclude whether TDD is better or worse than ITLD in terms of external quality and productivity in an industrial setting. We found that experimental factors such as selection of tasks could dominate the findings in TDD studies.

The PROFES Improvement Methodology - Enabling Technologies and Methodology Design

Software process improvement methodologies do not typically address product issues explicitly and integration of different technologies is often weak. In the European project PROFES an integrated, product-focused software process improvement methodology has been developed. This paper gives an overview of the methodology and explains its enabling technologies. Emphasis is on how the PROFES improvement methodology was created, what was the design rationale, and how the methodology was implemented.

Running software research programs: an agile approach

Agile, lean processes have become the de-facto way to operate in the domain of software intensive products. Methodologies such as the lean startup are reshaping the way new companies and even well-established enterprises seek new opportunities in their operations. In contrast, in research, little has changed during that time – organizations that fund research still expect a solid, linear research plan. In this paper, we present an attempt to challenge this model in software research, based on 7 years of experiences in two large, national, industry-led projects that followed a more agile mindset. Furthermore, we also provide an insight to key learnings and best practices of running software research in agile fashion.

Continuous and collaborative technology transfer: Software engineering research with real-time industry impact

Abstract Context: Traditional technology transfer models rely on the assumption that innovations are created in academia, after which they are transferred to industry using a sequential flow of activities. This model is outdated in contemporary software engineering research that is done in close collaboration between academia and industry and in large consortia rather than on a one-on-one basis. In the new setup, research can be viewed as continuous co-experimentation, where industry and academia closely collaborate and iteratively and jointly discover problems and develop, test, and improve solutions. Objective: The objective of the paper is to answer the following research questions: How can high-quality, ambitious software engineering research in a collaborative setup be conducted quickly and on a large scale? How can real-time business feedback to continuously improve candidate solutions be gained? Method: The proposed model has been created, refined, and evaluated in two large, national Finnish software research programs. For this paper, we conducted thematic interviews with representatives of four companies who participated in these programs. Results: The fundamental change is in the mindset of the participants from technology push by academia to technology pull by companies, resulting in co-creation. Furthermore, continuous cooperation between participants enables solutions to evolve in rapid cycles and forms a scalable model of interaction between research institutes and companies. Conclusions: The multifaceted nature of software engineering research calls for numerous approaches. In particular, when working with human-related topics such as company culture and development methods, many discoveries result from seamless collaboration between companies and research institutes.