Aurora Vizcaíno

One of the effects of COVID‐19 was that software engineers were forced to work remotely, in many cases without prior experience, which may have led to a number of challenges for projects and organizations, along with developers' well‐being. Several work styles were considered after the pandemic, because not only did teleworking persist but new forms of work emerged, for which neither organizations nor employees were prepared. These new modalities have led to challenges that have not yet been sufficiently addressed in the existing literature, mainly because they are relatively recent phenomena. The aim of this paper is to analyze the risks that remote or hybrid working can pose to software development and examine them from the perspective of the company, the project itself, and employees. Once the problems have been identified, it is important to analyze them from the point of view of a software engineer's personality and assess the likelihood of these challenges arising according to the working model used. It is also essential to find strategies with which to mitigate these challenges. These are the objectives of this paper, which aims to help project managers and developers carry out hybrid or remote software development efficiently and ensure their employees' well‐being. To achieve these objectives, a mixed‐methods approach comprising five stages was adopted: a systematic mapping review to identify and categorize the factors affecting software engineers, a survey of 184 practitioners to validate and refine these factors, a second survey examining the perceived impact of different work modalities on productivity and associated risks, and an evaluation of our framework (main contribution of this paper) through semi‐structured interviews with 10 practitioners.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote working seemed here to stay. However, attempts to return to working in the office are currently being made, mainly by large multinationals. We therefore set out to investigate software-industry workers’ opinions of their productivity in their current work mode. This paper presents the results of surveys applied to software engineers from Mexico, Spain, Colombia and Argentina with the purpose of analysing how they perceive their productivity and that of their team when working either partially or totally in a remote manner. The results indicate that most of the respondents prefer to work remotely. Furthermore, according to their perception, their productivity and that of their team is, in general, equal or superior to that achieved in the office.

IT workers, especially software developers, undergo high stress levels due to their intellectual activity, which requires creativity and problem-solving skills for specific situations. These circumstances often lead to a fast-paced lifestyle, such as sleep deprivation, often worn as a badge of honor. These demanding routines can have long-term negative consequences for their health. Therefore, software developers need to understand the dimensions that positively affect resilience levels regarding job demand control. In this work, the problem of how software developers address the pressure caused by the workload through resilience was addressed; some important findings of this study are the following: (1) The greater the social support, meaning the work done by software developers is supported and recognized, the higher the level of resilience the subjects of the sample present. (2) There is a higher level of job control and social support in male programmers compared to female programmers, as well as individuals who suffer from high blood pressure have less resilience and job control. (3) The levels of resilience are proportional to the perception that the employee has about job control; it is understood that the greater job control the developer feels about his responsibilities, the greater the resilience will be.

El trabajo remoto se afianzó tras la pandemia de COVID-19. Mientras grandes empresas buscan el retorno a oficinas, este estudio analiza la percepción de ingenieros de software en México, España, Colombia y Argentina sobre el teletrabajo.

Background: After the pandemic, software engineers were forced to work remotely, in many cases without prior experience of doing so.Objective: The objective of this work is to analyze the factors that influence engineers' motivation, stress and performance when working remotely after the pandemic, and to what level.Methods: A significant number (around 1000) of Latin‐American software development professionals from different countries who work remotely were surveyed in order to study the factors that affect them and how when they work in this manner. The data collected from the survey were then statistically analyzed using the partial least square‐structural equation modeling (PLS‐SEM) method.Conclusions: The analysis of the data made it possible to conclude that there are direct negative effects of stress on performance and direct positive effects of motivation on performance. In addition, we found that skills, experience, and teamwork behavior, such as trust, communication, and knowledge sharing, play an important role when working remotely.

Requirements engineering needs a good process and the right tool. Yet in many companies I observe unsuitable use of tools. Missing, wrong, and changing requirements are major failure points. Tools for requirements facilitate professional and efficient engineering throughout the lifecycle. We provide here an overview and evaluation of current requirements engineering tools. Hands-on guidance on tool selection and their usage facilitates selecting the right tool for your environment.—Christof Ebert

Software productivity matters but is not much understood. To boost productivity many silver bullets have been suggested over time and even more technology hypes. Yet, most companies do not even know how to measure productivity. We will show here how software productivity can be measured and improved. No silver bullets, but hands-on practical insights. An industry survey with software developers from five continents shows major productivity drivers. I look forward to hearing from you about this column and the technologies that matter most for your work.—Christof Ebert

The objective of this study is to analyze the current perspective as regards knowledge related to what causes stress or motivates developers, how these two aspects are related to each other, and how this in turn affects their performance in the sphere of Global Software Development and how these can be controlled. This paper presents the results obtained after conducting a systematic mapping study of literature in order to analyze how stress, motivation, and performance affect the project members in Global Software Development teams. We carried out a systematic mapping of published studies dealing with stress, motivation, and performance in global software engineering. A total of 118 papers dealing with this subject were found. The literature analyzed provided a relatively significant quantity of data referring to the impact that the characteristics of distributed software development projects have on the performance and productivity of teams, along with the actions taken to improve that performance. However, when focusing on the analysis of the impact of this type of projects on team members' motivation, and on the actions that can be taken to improve that motivation, we discovered that the number of works decreases considerably and that works referring to the impact of this kind of development on developers' stress were virtually non‐existent, as were those concerning ways in which to improve that stress. We are, therefore, of the opinion that it is necessary to carry out in‐depth research into the aspects of working in distributed teams that may have a negative impact on developers' levels of motivation and stress, along with what could be beneficial in order to improve levels of motivation and decrease levels of stress.

Project managers tend to confront multiple challenges in Global Software Development (GSD), including misunderstandings about the project requirements, complex estimations of costs, risks, and efforts, along with increases in task allocation and a lack of coordination. “Soft skills” play a fundamental role in solving these challenges, as they are the human or social abilities that facilitate the resolution of conflicts and involve dealing with people and managing projects in their most social and creative dimension. However, developing the soft skills that allow project managers to lead in an effective manner is not an easy task, especially in global or distributed environments, where coordination and control problems are commonplace. One suitable mechanism with which to develop these soft skills is that of serious games, which focus on learning by doing and allow users to simulate real scenarios. The authors of this article are aware of the usefulness of this type of teaching method and have, therefore, developed the serious game described herein. This serious game is denominated as Global Manager and is focused on helping both students and novice project managers to become aware of the factors that may affect GSD projects. Global Manager was evaluated by means of a quasi-experiment based on a pretest-posttest design, which was used to assess whether the game can increase the players’ awareness and knowledge of the factors that a project manager should consider in GSD projects. The results obtained after evaluating the game were quite satisfactory, as the game taught the players to differentiate between global and distributed software projects and to experience situations that may and do occur in these settings. Furthermore, Global Manager helped improve players' perceptions of the importance of different influencing factors in GSD.

Enterprise architecture is a growing trend that aims to help deal with the complexity of socio‐technical systems such as human organizations, as well as their information technology and systems areas. Nevertheless, the contribution of enterprise architecture to the field of software engineering remains unclear. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to see how enterprise architecture is used in software development and maintenance practice. To this end, we first carried out a search in the SCOPUS database and then organized the papers according to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge to determine what areas of software engineering are covered by each research study. To understand how enterprise architecture is used, we established a classification based on ISO 42010 and TOGAF. From the systematic literature review, we noticed that the early stages of development are the most impacted by the enterprise architecture. On the other hand, we observed that enterprise architecture is of assistance in the areas of engineering management, engineering processes, and engineering models and methods; these tasks are carried out by teams or managers using different, often agile, development methods or standards. In turn, we found that the most common categories are architecture descriptions; these are often used to facilitate communication and information‐sharing between different stakeholders, in addition to frameworks, which will help to establish common practices in the organization related to the joint use of enterprise architecture and software development.