Nils Moe

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Papers by Nils Moe

Managing Competing Concerns in Digital Innovation: A Case Study of an Incumbent Maritime Company

The need for new digitally enhanced solutions has led companies in traditionally non-digital indu... more The need for new digitally enhanced solutions has led companies in traditionally non-digital industries to explore the potential of digital innovation. Various process frameworks claim their ability to support this endeavor by facilitating the digital innovation process. However, such frame-works alone may not be sufficient because digital innovation in established firms tends to involve numerous actors with competing interests. This introduces the need to manage the competing concerns in order to orchestrate the digital innovation process. Knowledge about how the organizational actors negotiate, agree, and collectively drive the innovation process forward thus becomes crucial. This interpretive case study describes how participants of a digital innovation program in an established maritime company manage their competing concerns through four negotiation episodes: Mobilizing of internal stakeholders, Developing capacity for faster decision-making, Pricing new digital services, and E...

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Accountability Requirements in the Cloud Provider Chain

Symmetry, 2018

In order to be responsible stewards of other people's data, cloud providers must be accountable f... more In order to be responsible stewards of other people's data, cloud providers must be accountable for their data handling practices. The potential long provider chains in cloud computing introduce additional accountability challenges, with many stakeholders involved. Symmetry is very important in any requirements' elicitation activity, since input from diverse stakeholders needs to be balanced. This article ventures to answer the question "How can one create an accountable cloud service?" by examining requirements which must be fulfilled to achieve an accountability-based approach, based on interaction with over 300 stakeholders.

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Work Patterns of Software Engineers in the Forced Working-From-Home Mode

The COVID-19 outbreak has admittedly caused a major disruption worldwide. The interruptions to pr... more The COVID-19 outbreak has admittedly caused a major disruption worldwide. The interruptions to production, transportation and mobility have clearly had a significant impact on the wellfunctioning of the global supply and demand chain. But what happened to the companies developing digital services, such as software? Were they interrupted as much or at all? And how has the enforced Working-From-Home (WFH) mode impacted their ability to continue to deliver software. We hear that some managers are concerned that their engineers are not working effectively from home, or even lack the motivation to work in general, that teams lose touch and that managers do not notice when things go wrong. At the same time, some companies, like Twitter and Facebook, announce their permanent remote-work policies. In this article, we share our findings from monitoring the situation in an international software company with engineers located in Sweden, USA and the UK, by analyzing archives of commit data, ca...

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Are Daily Stand-up Meetings Valuable? A Survey of Developers in Software Teams

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2017

The daily stand-up meeting is a widely used practice. However, what is more uncertain is how valu... more The daily stand-up meeting is a widely used practice. However, what is more uncertain is how valuable the practice is to team members. We invited professional developers of a programming forum to a survey and obtained 221 responses. Results show that the daily stand-up meeting was used by 87% of those who employ agile methods. We found that even though the respondents on average were neutral towards the practice, the majority were either positive or negative. Junior developers were most positive and senior developers and members of large teams most negative. We argue that the value of the practice should be evaluated according to the team needs. Further, more work is needed to understand why senior developers do not perceive the meetings as valuable and how to apply the practice successfully in large teams.

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The future of information security incident management training: A case study of electrical power companies

Computers & Security, 2016

Recent attacks and threat reports indicate that industrial control organizations are attractive t... more Recent attacks and threat reports indicate that industrial control organizations are attractive targets for attacks. Emerging threats create the need for a well-established capacity for responding to unwanted incidents. Such a capacity is influenced by organizational, human, and technological factors. We have conducted extensive fieldwork for 2.5 years in Norwegian electric power companies with the aim of identifying challenges for improving information security incident management practices. Semi-structured interviews, document analysis, a survey and participant observations have been performed as part of this case study. We describe how training for responding to information security incidents is given low priority and that different types of personnel, such as business managers and technical personnel, have different perspectives and priorities in regard to information security. Moreover, there is a gap in how IT staff and control system staff understand information security. Furthermore, cross-functional teams need to be created to ensure a holistic view during the incident response process. To improve the capacity for responding to incidents, organizations need regular training sessions and systematic evaluations after such sessions. There is also the potential for improvement in evaluating minor incidents. A transition from an ad hoc approach to a systematic approach in training and learning requires a reorientation not only by the electric power companies but also by management. We found that learning to learn will enable the organizations to improve their incident response practices.

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Understanding Shared Leadership in Agile Development: A Case Study

2009 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2009

... We also noticed that the discussions were mostly about issues relevant to the Product-owner, ... more

The Impact of Process Workshop Involvement on the Use of an Electronic Process Guide: A Case Study

31st EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications

ABSTRACT Many software companies disseminate process knowledge through electronic process guides.... more ABSTRACT Many software companies disseminate process knowledge through electronic process guides. A common problem with process guides is that they are not used in practice. Through a case study we investigate how involvement in creating an electronic process guide through process workshops influences the use of the process guide. We interviewed ten software developers and project managers in a medium-size company about how they use a process guide. Workshop participants show a higher degree of usage over time, a larger number of project support functions taken in use, and express more advantages with the process guide. From this we conclude that small and medium-sized software companies should involve users in developing electronic process guides.

Scrum and Team Effectiveness: Theory and Practice

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2008

... This case study was done in the context of a larger action research program, where several co... more

Agile Process Improvement: Diagnosis and Planning to Improve Teamwork

Systems, Software and Service Process Improvement, 2011

Agile software development addresses software process improvement within teams. Process improveme... more Agile software development addresses software process improvement within teams. Process improvement, although a central concept in agile development, is still hard to achieve. This paper argues for the use of diagnosis and action planning to improve teamwork in agile software development. Diagnosis and action planning is illustrated in a small and immature team and in a large and more mature team. The action planning focused on improving shared leadership, team orientation and learning. The improvement project provided most new insight for the mature team.

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A Workshop-Oriented Approach for Defining Electronic Process Guides – A Case Study

Software Process Improvement, 2006

We introduce electronic process guides, and discuss their role in software engineering projects. ... more We introduce electronic process guides, and discuss their role in software engineering projects. We then present existing methods for constructing electronic process guides by defining a set of common processes for a company. Different approaches from the software engineering and management science are presented. We then go on to propose a new way of dealing with process description in software engineering: using process workshops as a tool to reach consensus on work practice. The main reason for this is to get realistic descriptions with accurate detail as well as company commitment in an efficient manner. We describe our workshop-oriented method to define processes, which we have used in small software companies, and show examples of results.

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Measuring software methodology usage: challenges of conceptualization and operationalization

2005 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, 2005.

Most software engineering research implicitly assumes that development methodologies are useful a... more Most software engineering research implicitly assumes that development methodologies are useful and that there is a direct relationship between software methodologies and their effects on organizational performance. However, a methodology cannot have an impact if it is not used. The purpose of this paper is, thus, to raise a number of challenges related to the conceptualization and Operationalization of methodology usage and to report on a study that compared subjective and objective operationalizations of usage. Results of regression analyses show that these operationalizations do not appear to be strongly related. While self-reported usage is related to self-reported measures of the independent variables of methodology acceptance in the study, the objective and computer-recorded measures show different and distinctly weaker links. There are several explanations to these seemingly contradictory results. Most importantly, the results of this study suggest a need for reconceptualization and better validation of methodology usage constructs in future, empirical software engineering research.

The process workshop: A tool to define electronic process guides in small software companies

2004 Australian Software Engineering Conference, Proceedings, 2004

... People from the pilot project can also participate, to share their experience of following th... more

Investigating Daily Team Meetings in Agile Software Projects

2012 38th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, 2012

ABSTRACT An increasing amount of time is being spent at organizational meetings. One common type ... more ABSTRACT An increasing amount of time is being spent at organizational meetings. One common type of meeting in software projects is the daily team meeting, which is the most important forum for coordinating and planning daily work. To better understand how software teams make decisions, communicate, and coordinate their work, we must uncover the micro-level interaction processes among the team members at these meetings. We analyzed transcriptions of eight daily meetings from two software development teams. The agile literature states that the daily meeting should focus on answering questions such as &quot;What have I done? What will be done? What obstacles are in my way?&quot; However, on average, only 24% of each of the meetings that we studied focused on this task. We found that 35% of the meeting was spent on elaborating problem issues and discussing possible solutions. Very little time was used for coordinating tasks. Our results indicate that many project decisions are made in daily team meetings and that this quick decision making requires team members to be experts. These experts need to have a shared understanding of who is responsible for what and of the information and requirements needed to solve the tasks.

Balancing Individual and Collaborative Work in Agile Teams

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2009

... Information Systems, Technology and Management, UNSW, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia hamish@hbarn... more

Praktisk prosessforbedring: en håndbok for IT-bedrifter

Icgse 2012

From Offshore Outsourcing to Offshore Insourcing: Three Stories .................................... more From Offshore Outsourcing to Offshore Insourcing: Three Stories ................................................... ...........1 Nils Brede Moe, Darja Šmite, and Geir Kjetil Hanssen ... Agile vs. Structured Distributed Software Development: A Case Study .....................................................11 H.-Christian Estler, Martin Nordio, Carlo A. Furia, Bertrand Meyer, and Johannes Schneider ... Activity Theory Applied to Global Software Engineering: Theoretical Foundations and Implications for Tool Builders ....... ...................................................................................21 Paolo Tell and Muhammad Ali Babar

The Adoption of an Electronic Process Guide in a Company with Voluntary Use

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

... 179-211. 2. Baruch, Y. (1999) Response Rate in Academic Studies - A Comparative Analysis, Hum... more

A Taxonomy of Inter-Team Coordination Mechanisms in Large-Scale Agile

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2022

In large-scale agile software development, many teams work together to achieve overarching projec... more In large-scale agile software development, many teams work together to achieve overarching project goals. The more teams, the greater the coordination requirements. Despite the growing popularity of large-scale agile, inter-team coordination is challenging to practice and research. We conducted a case study over 1.5 years in a large-scale software development firm to better understand which inter-team coordination mechanisms are used in large-scale agile and how they support inter-team coordination. Based on a thematic analysis of 31 interviews, 113 hours of observations, and supplemental material, we identified 27 inter-team coordination mechanisms. From this, we offer the following contributions. First, we propose a taxonomy of interteam coordination with three categories: coordination meetings, such as communities of practice, inter-team stand-ups, and retrospectives; coordination roles, such as the program architects and the platform team; and coordination tools and artefacts, such as Slack and JIRA as well as inter-team task boards, product backlogs, and roadmaps. Second, the coordination mechanisms displayed combinations of four key characteristics, technical, organizational, physical, and social (TOPS), which form the basis of the TOPS framework to capture the multifaceted characteristics of coordination mechanisms. Technical relates to the software product and/or technical tools supporting software development. Organizational pertains to the structural aspects of the organization. Physical refers to tangible or spatial characteristics. Social captures interpersonal and community-based characteristics. Finally, the taxonomy and the TOPS framework provide a knowledge base and a structured approach for researchers to study as well as for software practitioners to understand and improve inter-team coordination in large-scale agile.

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Agile Information System Development Organizations Transforming to Large-Scale Collaboration

ArXiv, 2021

We report findings from a case study of a large agile information systems development (ISD) organ... more We report findings from a case study of a large agile information systems development (ISD) organization`s sudden transformation to distributed, digital work in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It seeks to understand how knowledge creation and sharing changes. The findings show various forms of distance being introduced, digital tool usage, increased task orientation, and variations across teams. To analyze the findings, we use the concepts of large-scale collaborations and sociability. Large-scale collaboration offers a socio-technical perspective on tackling distributed knowledge sharing and creation in the presence of multiple, loosely coupled partners using digital tools for collaboration. We show what the digital tools afford using the concept of sociability. We discuss how distributed digital practices make teams more task-oriented and that creating and maintaining sociability, a key issue for knowledge sharing in agile ISD organizations, require relation oriented communi...

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Team autonomy and digital transformation

AI & SOCIETY, 2022

The organizational theory literature is reasonably unanimous that team autonomy is a key factor f... more The organizational theory literature is reasonably unanimous that team autonomy is a key factor for employee well-being and motivation as well as organizational performance. However, team autonomy is challenged when its processes and outputs need to be aligned with actors and factors external to a team. There are likely challenges and conflicts between team autonomy and the need for coherence in the wider system. Team autonomy has a range of implications and is challenged by a number of factors, such as knowledge complexity and decision-making, learning, large-scale problems, product and technical interdependencies, the use of platforms, virtual collaboration and diversity. Alignment with the external is particularly necessary in multi-team environments with many technical interdependencies, where a single team's failure to deliver a sufficient level of quality may lead to system-wide consequences. Therefore, teams in complex environments increasingly need to regulate and manage their work in cooperation with internal and external partners and systems. Such dependencies challenge team autonomy. In this special issue of AI&S, we want to address these topics in more detail, particularly in the context of software-intensive organizations and digital transformations. The scope and, thus, the consequences of a team's work can be far-reaching when the team's effort and output take place partially or completely in fully digitized contexts and processes. The articles in this special issue show various ways of dealing with the challenge of balancing autonomy and alignment with the external. A key focus is to show the buffering function: how teams, with the help of processes, technology, new organizational forms and time and space are able to find the buffer needed for maintaining team autonomy.

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