Improving Productivity through Corporate Hackathons: A Multiple Case Study of Two Large-scale Agile Organizations

12/10/2021
by   Nils Brede Moe, et al.
0

Software development companies organize hackathons to encourage innovation. Despite many benefits of hackathons, in large-scale agile organizations where many teams work together, stopping the ongoing work results in a significant decrease in the immediate output. Motivated by the need to understand whether and how to run hackathons, we investigated how the practice affects productivity on the individual and organizational levels. By mapping the benefits and challenges to an established productivity framework, we found that hackathons improve developers' satisfaction and well-being, strengthen the company culture, improve performance (as many ideas are tested), increase activity (as the ideas are developed quickly), and improve communication and collaboration (because the social network is strengthened). Addressing managerial concerns, we found that hackathons also increase efficiency and flow because people learn to complete work and make progress quickly, and they build new competence. Finally, with respect to virtual hackathons we found that developers work more in isolation because tasks are split between team members resulting in less collaboration. This means that some important, expected hackathon values in virtual contexts require extra effort and cannot be taken for granted.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
04/16/2019

Happiness and the productivity of software engineers

Software companies and startups often follow the idea of flourishing hap...
research
06/01/2021

Innovation in Large-scale agile – Benefits and Challenges of Hackathons when Hacking from Home

Hackathons are events in which diverse teams work together to explore, a...
research
08/09/2013

Innovation networks

This paper advances a framework for modeling the component interactions ...
research
05/12/2022

An Actionable Framework for Understanding and Improving Developer Experience

Developer experience is an important concern for software organizations ...
research
04/01/2020

A Case Study on Tool Support for Collaboration in Agile Development

We report on a longitudinal case study conducted at the Italian site of ...
research
08/11/2021

What Drives and Sustains Self-Assignment in Agile Teams

Self-assignment, where software developers choose their own tasks, is a ...
research
01/12/2022

Big Data = Big Insights? Operationalising Brooks' Law in a Massive GitHub Data Set

Massive data from software repositories and collaboration tools are wide...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset