Newspapers’ digital transformation offers various opportunities and challenges for publishers. While some publishers, such as The New York Times, have been able to monetize their online content, many publishers struggle to sustain revenues. Drawing on the strategic alliance literature, we propose that a coopetitive news platform co-owned and operated by multiple competing publishers for cross-selling online news could resolve this problem. However, we lack theoretically grounded design knowledge for designing such a coopetitive news platform. We conducted a 5-year echeloned design science research (eDSR) project to address this gap. Through 16 design echelons, we developed a news platform prototype and produced design knowledge for developing it. Our findings offer proof of concept and proof of value for the proposed artefact from users’ and online news publishers’ perspectives. Our contributions to the literature and practice are several. We developed design principles and abductively built a mid-range design theory for designing coopetitive news platforms that loosely couple platform proxies, enabling them to form a coopetition alliance. This, in turn, creates novel opportunities for bundling and cross-selling content from various competing publishers via novel coopetitive subscription plans.

Setting up and configuring local development environments is often laborious, time-consuming, and error-prone, which can negatively impact developer experience (DX). Despite a growing body of literature on DX, the existing studies remain silent about the impact of setting up and configuring local development tools and environments on DX. Against this backdrop, we conducted an Action Design Research (ADR) study in a Finnish software company to examine this impact and propose a solution for enhancing the experience. In addition to explaining how DX is shaped when setting up and configuring development environments, we propose the concept of Development Environment as Code (DEaC) as a solution for mitigating some of the issues associated with the process. Based on the lessons learned from the project, we offer four theoretically informed and empirically grounded design principles (DPs) for creating other instances of the artefact with the specific goal of improving DX related to managing their development environments. The paper concludes with recommendations for organisations to consider when adopting DEaC.

Agile software development (ASD) methods have increasingly been used in large-scale software development projects. While ASD emphasizes the importance of social interactions between practitioners for continuous reflection and knowledge sharing, these learning activities become incredibly challenging in large-scale projects. Drawing on well-established theoretical concepts, we posit that learning in large-scale ASD projects requires a suitable environment that empowers practitioners to openly and frequently engage in social interactions necessary for reflection and knowledge sharing. We hypothesize that several team-level factors shape individuals’ perceptions about the learning environment and learning activities in their projects and ultimately influence their learning behavior. To test our model, we collected survey responses from practitioners working in large-scale ASD projects in five Swedish companies (N=159). The data was analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM). The results show that team structure plays a crucial role in promoting team cohesion and reflexivity, which, alongside knowledge sharing, contribute to learning. Our study provides ASD development research with a theoretically informed understanding of the interrelationship between the learning environment and learning activities in large-scale ASD. Our results guide practitioners in fostering suitable learning environments and enhancing learning in large-scale ASD.

Developing high-quality software requires skilled software professionals equipped with a set of basic and essential software engineering competencies (SEC). These competencies and the satisfaction levels derived from them change over a project's lifecycle, or as software professionals move from one project to another. Previous studies suggest a lack of means enabling SEC stakeholders to identify and assess competencies suitable for different projects. Additionally, previous research has mainly portrayed SEC to be static and overlooked their evolution over time and across projects. We investigate how we could effectively identify and match the competencies of software professionals necessary for different projects. We follow a mixed-method approach to iteratively develop and evaluate a framework for identifying and managing SEC. In so doing, we use the results of an extensive literature review, focus group discussions with experts from academia and industry, and data collected through interviews with 138 individuals with a supervisory role in the software industry. Drawing on the Kano model and Competency Framework for Software Engineers, we propose a Unified Competence Gate for Software Professionals (UComGSP), a framework for identifying and managing SEC. The UComGSP consists of 62 hard competencies, 63 soft competencies, and 25 essential SEC competencies. Additionally, we propose three stakeholders’ satisfaction levels for SEC assessment: basic, performance, and delighter. Furthermore, based on empirical observation, we report 27 competencies not mentioned in the reviewed literature; 11 of them are considered essential competencies. Competence development involves different stakeholders, including software professionals, educators, and the software industry. The UComGSP framework enables SEC stakeholders to (i) identify SE competencies, (ii) identify the essential SEC, and (iii) assess the satisfaction levels that can be derived from different competencies. Future research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework across software development projects.

Considering the critical role of software in modern societies, we face an urgent need to educate more competent software professionals. Software engineering competencies (SEC) are considered the backbone of successfully developing software products. Consequently, SEC has become a hotspot for software engineering research and practice. Although scientific literature on SEC is not lacking, to our knowledge, a comprehensive overview of the current state of SEC research is missing. To that end, we conducted an extensive and systematic review of the SEC literature. We provide an overview of the current state of research on SEC, with a particular focus on common SEC research areas. In addition to reporting the available SEC models and frameworks, we compile a list of 49 unique essential competencies of software professionals. Finally, we highlight several gaps in the literature that deserve further research. In particular, we call for a better understanding of how the essential competencies of software professionals change over time, as well as fresh accounts of the essential competencies of software professionals. Additionally, considering recent shifts toward Agile and DevOps methods, future research must explore the competencies required for developing software products in modern development environments.

The database and the database management system (DBMS) are two of the main components of any information system. Structured Query Language (SQL) is the most popular query language for retrieving data from the database, as well as for many other data management tasks. During system development and maintenance, software developers use a considerable amount of time to interpret compiler error messages. The quality of these error messages has been demonstrated to affect software development effectiveness, and correctly formulating queries and fixing them when needed is an important task for many software developers. In this study, we set out to investigate how participants (N=152) experienced the qualities of error messages of four popular DBMSs in terms of error message effectiveness, perceived usefulness for finding and fixing errors, and error recovery confidence. Our results show differences between the DBMSs by three of the four metrics, and indicate a discrepancy between objective effectiveness and subjective usefulness. The results suggest that although error messages have perceived differences in terms of usefulness for finding and fixing errors, these differences may not necessarily result in differences in query fixing success rates.

Background: In the last two decades Technical Debt (TD) has received a considerable amount of attention from software engineering research and practice. Recently, a small group of studies suggests that, in addition to its technical and economic consequences, TD can affect developers' psychological states and morale. However, until now there has been a lack of empirical research clarifying such influences. Aims: In this study, we aim at taking the first step in filling this gap by investigating the potential impacts of TD and its management on developers' morale. Method: Drawing from previous literature on morale, we decided to explore the influence of TD and its management on three dimensions of morale called affective, future/goal, and interpersonal antecedents. In so doing, we conducted an exploratory field study and collected data from software professionals active in different industrial domains through eight qualitative interviews and an online survey (n=33). Results: Our results indicate that TD mainly has a negative influence on future/goal and affective antecedents of morale. This is mainly because the occurrence of TD hinders developers from performing their tasks and achieving their goals. TD management, on the other hand, has a positive influence on all the three dimensions of morale since it is associated with positive feelings and interpersonal feedback as well as a sense of progress. Conclusions: According to the results of this empirical study, the occurrence of TD reduces developers' morale, while its management increases developers' morale.