Academic Keynote:
Brian Fitzgerald: “Crowdsourcing Software Development: Silver Bullet or Lead Balloon”
Lero, University of Limerick IRELAND
Abstract
Crowdsourcing is emerging as an alternative outsourcing strategy which is gaining increasing attention in the software engineering community. However, crowdsourcing software development involves complex tasks which differ significantly from the micro-tasks that can be found on crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk—the latter are much shorter in duration, and typically very simple and do not involve any task interdependencies.
To achieve the potential benefits of crowdsourcing in the software development context, companies need to understand how this strategy works, what challenges arise, and what factors might affect crowd participation. Research to date on crowdsourcing software development has tended to focus on the ‘crowd’ or the technical platform, with little research from the perspective of the customer who is seeking to leverage the crowdsourcing development model.
The findings from an in-depth case study of crowd-sourcing software development in a Fortune 500 company are augmented with an analysis of over 13,000 crowdsourcing competitions over a ten-year period on the Topcoder crowdsourcing platform, one of the most popular platforms for software development, are drawn on to evaluate the effectiveness of crowdsourcing in a software development context.
Bio for Brian Fitzgerald
Professor Brian Fitzgerald is Director of Lero – the Irish Software Research Centre, where he previously held the role of Chief Scientist. Prior to that he served as Vice-President Research at the University of Limerick. He also holds an endowed professorship, the Krehbiel Chair in Innovation in Business & Technology, at the University of Limerick.
His research interests lie primarily in software development, encompassing open source and inner source, crowdsourcing software development, agile and lean software development, and global software development. His publications include 15 books, and over 150 peer-reviewed articles in the leading international journals and conferences in both the Information Systems and Software Engineering fields, including MIS Quarterly (MISQ), Information Systems Research (ISR), IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) and ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology (TOSEM).
Prior to taking up an academic position, he worked in the software industry for about 12 years, in a variety of sectors (including finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, bespoke software development) in a number of countries (Ireland, Belgium, Germany).
Industry Keynote:
Lennart Krook, Zenuity: Agile Transformation and Challenges in Automotive Industry – The Way Forward from Zenuity
Zenuity Sweden
Abstract
Automotive industry of the past has been inherently characterized by standardized ways of working and relatively clear boundaries of innovation (often hardware related). The value chain in the automotive industry today is disrupted by a number of risks, putting new pressure on the companies working in this industry. Innovation has become a context or necessity to survive and a strategy to evolve. This talk will focus on the way Zenuity, one of the leading companies in automated driving technology space, has tackled their agile journey. As a result of the total business model and organizational transformation, the company has managed to step away from traditional organizational setup and run portfolio management from the top to the bottom. Their reward is speed, flexibility and ability to react to the market needs and changes. Since Zenuity is a global company with three geographically, culturally and temporally distributed sites in Sweden, Germany and USA, the challenges of global software work are, of course, not alien. Many of these challenges have yet been successfully addressed by the new ways of organizing the company stuff and sites. Furthermore, the company aims to scale further and add new locations, and the new business model will support the company in the future evolution.
Bio for Lennart Krook
Lennart Krook is the Vice President of Zenuity, one of the leaders in automated driving technology space. In his role, Lennart is the lead in the area of engineering culture that covers operational development, way of working, functional safety and quality. He helps the company to use a disruptive, never-been-seen before, business model to produce world-leading competence in the automotive industry with the emphasis on safety critical development. Together with the rest of the leadership team, Lennart works to ensure that the Zenuity team is able to deliver the leading advanced driver assistance, highly automated driving, and cloud based automotive software, as the company is dedicated to transforming the automotive industry and catapulting into the future of transportation.
Lennart Krook has a wide experience in managing global collaborations. Prior to his engagement in Zenuity, Lennart Krook worked as an Area Product Owner in Ericsson in Sweden, where he has been responsible for driving the implementation of a new way of working focusing on lean and agile development in a large-scale product development spilt across three different locations. He has also been a Director of Systems Management in Ericsson in China, helping to build a complete R&D organization from 0 to 400 employees and acting as an important bridge to the Swedish Ericsson sites.