Context The COVID‐19 pandemic has had a disruptive impact on how people work and collaborate across all global economic sectors, including software business. While remote working is not new for software engineers, forced WFH situations come with both limitations and opportunities. As the ‘new normal’ for working might be based on the current state of Work‐from‐home (WFH), it is useful to understand what has happened and learn from that. Objective This study aims to gain insights into how their WFH arrangement impacts project management and software engineering. We are also interested in exploring these impacts in different contexts, such as startups and established companies. Method We conducted a global‐scale, cross‐sectional survey during the spring and summer 2021. Our results are based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of 297 valid responses. Results We characterize the profile of WFH in both spatial and temporal aspects, together with a set of common collaborative tools and coordination and control mechanisms. We revealed some areas of project management that are relatively more challenging during WFH situations, such as coordination, communication and project planning. We also revealed a mixed picture of the perceived impact of WFH on different software engineering activities. Conclusion WFH is a situational phenomenon which can have both negative and positive impact on software teams. For practitioners, we suggest a unified approach to consider the context of WFH, collaborative tools, associated coordination and control approaches and a process that resolve those aspects that are sensitive to physical interaction.

A software startup is an emerging company focused on the creation and development of an innovative software-intensive product or service as the basis for creating business value. Given the limited resources that startups have, the Lean Startup model advocates the creation of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to validate the assumptions about the product or service, and the target market. This study presents the results of a series of interviews with founders of software ventures in relation to the type of MVP they implement, the choice of potential clients, validation mechanisms and difficulties they face in the process of developing and validating the MVP. The main results indicate that the preferred MVP types are landing pages and mock-ups with some functionalities, validation with selected early adopters, obtaining feedback based on interviews and comments, and that the main difficulties encountered are due to lack of experience in software development and in choosing the right technology.

This paper presents the process and outcomes of a systematic literature mapping about the application of the Use Cases technique for software requirements specification in distributed software development environments. The purpose is to identify which methods, tools and methodologies are reported in literature as more frequently used and how the Use Case technique is applied when the project team is not collocated.

Software development requires professionals with knowledge and experience on many different methodologies, tools, and techniques.However, the so-called soft skills, such as interpersonal skills, teamwork, problem solving and customer orientation to name just a few, are as important as, or even more important than, traditional qualifications and technical skills.Members of scrum teams, particularly the ones performing the roles of Product Owner and Scrum Master, are not exempt of having these kind of skills because of the distinctive duties and responsibilities of these roles in a Scrum team.In this paper we report a field study in which we interviewed 25 experienced Scrum practitioners from software companies in Uruguay to know their points of view about what are the soft skills they consider the most valued to have by the Product Owner and the Scrum Master of a Scrum team.As a result, Communication skills, Customer orientation, and Teamwork appear as the most valued soft skills Product Owner should have, while Commitment, Communication skills, Interpersonal skills, Planning skills, and Teamwork are considered the most valued ones for the Scrum Master.

In the last decade we have witnessed a growth in outsourcing and outshoring development. Following the promise of reducing costs and round-the-clock development, software organizations have grown from local to global enterprises. In the same decade, agile software development methodologies have emerged as a viable alternative to produce software. There is a myriad of agile processes and methodologies now available for any software development organization to choose from. These agile processes follow the values signed in the Agile Manifesto that preaches the exaltation of the individual programmer, high feedback, customer interaction and just enough planning and documentation. But how does global distribution affect these values? Can agile software development be implemented under the global software development context? This paper presents a systematic literature review aimed at identifying factors that affect the adoption of agile factors in global distributed teams. Our findings show that the literature is still in its initial case study publication stage. But most notably, we have found that only a few of the factors found are related to the agile values. Even though more research is clearly needed, this can be a signal that the factors affecting team distribution has more impact on software development than the values and practices preached by the agile processes.