Pr. Viktoria Stray - The Changing Nature of Teamwork and Coordination: How Hybrid Work and AI Affect Software Development
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Abstract: Effective teamwork in software development depends on how people coordinate their work. Since 2010, I have studied how software teams do this in practice: in daily stand-up meetings, in Slack channels, across teams in large-scale agile programs, and in hybrid settings. Throughout this research, a recurring question has been how to give people time for focused work while enabling them to work well together.
Today, hybrid work and generative AI make this question more pressing. AI assistants help developers solve problems without waiting for a colleague or interrupting someone else's work. Yet asking a colleague can do more than resolve an immediate problem. It can reveal misunderstandings, create opportunities for learning, and help people understand what others are working on. What happens to these opportunities when developers turn to AI instead?
In this keynote, I bring a team perspective to a discussion often centered on the individual developer. Drawing on years of fieldwork and our recent studies of AI use in software development, I explore what changes when people can do more on their own, and what they still need to accomplish together. I argue that when developers become more independent, teams need to rethink how they coordinate, share knowledge, and learn.
Earlier shifts towards distributed and hybrid work offer lessons for this transition. I will discuss what we can learn from those experiences, where the comparison falls short, and what new questions arise as AI agents become part of the team’s work processes and take on work that requires coordination. These questions matter both for how teams organize their everyday work and for how we study their ability to deliver and learn over time. |
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Viktoria Stray is a Full Professor of Software Engineering and Deputy Head of the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo, and a Senior Research Scientist at SINTEF Digital. Her research focuses on coordination and teamwork in software development, particularly in large-scale agile settings, including autonomous teams, meetings, hybrid work, and generative AI in development work. For more than fifteen years, she has studied software teams in close collaboration with industry, in Norway and internationally. Her work has been identified as highly influential in agile software development research. She leads Software Engineering Hub Norway, a national research network, and has served as program co-chair of PROFES, EASE, and the XP conference. Before academia, she worked as a consultant at Accenture. In 2025, she was named one of Norway’s 50 leading women in tech. |