Abstract
Context
Currently, organizations seek to evolve software engineering methodologies targeting a wider and healthier collaboration among their functional areas. In this context, the interface between business and development (BizDev) includes all the interactions between Information Technology and business areas within an organization. Although we have been observing a small number of studies about this interface, we still consider the area lacks deeper characterization and deserves analysis in more diverse contexts.
Goal
We aimed to understand how the BizDev interface works under enterprise and innovative contexts, raising information on roles, responsibilities, and practices in the interface.
Method
We conducted a case study in a Brazilian company through the application of semi-structured interviews with fifteen people from both technology and business areas. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and further analyzed using Grounded Theory procedures, namely the open, axial, and selective coding phases. Finally, the synthesis was validated with participants.
Results
Not only we obtained relevant information on roles, responsibilities, and practices in the BizDev interface, but we also identified a phenomenon in which IT people acted in business. We observed development analysts and leaders working on defining and prioritizing requirements, analyzing business indicators, and presenting feature propositions. Also, the organizational culture strongly influenced this behavior through the sense of ownership and meritocracy. This performance is also characterized as data-driven, with IT people constantly extracting metrics and using them to validate and justify their work in business.
Conclusion
The organizational culture and the open BizDev communication were the main motivators and support for IT people to act in business. Despite the positive results, developers also delivered features that harmed some business aspects. Therefore, while we advocate organizations should review their organizational values and culture to motivate this behavior, we suggest that guidance from the business area is necessary, introducing measures to prevent business decisions from being made solely by the IT area.
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Data Availability Statements
This study relies primarily on qualitative data from interviews. All the supplementary material is available at https://zenodo.org/record/8006919. It includes
-Business profile interview script;
-Tech profile interview script;
-Head of Technology interview script;
-The whole codebook with quotes for all the codes and groundedness level per code;
-A detailed analysis of the attributes and causes for good and bad BizDev communication
Notes
Throughout this paper, we refer to the company as CompanyP, and ProductP for referring to its main product, the mobile app, for confidentiality.
ATLAS.ti supports different GT procedures, such as tagging codes on raw text files and creating networks connecting these codes: https://software.com.br/p/atlas-ti
When interviewers at CompanyP reference Squads, they are referencing Spotify’s model of organization, in which teams (squads) should be composed of people from different areas of knowledge: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf
Slack is an instant messaging program developed for professional and organizational communications: https://slack.com/
“A 1-1 is a dedicated space on the calendar and in your mental map for open-ended and anticipated conversation between a manager and an employee.” (https://wavelength.asana.com/workstyle-what-is-a-1-1/)
Firebase is a set of back-end cloud computing services provided by Google, including detailed dashboards with relevant metrics for applications: https://firebase.google.com
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Brazilian Company and the participants for supporting this research. We thank the reviewers for all their suggestions, many of which we incorporated into the paper and significantly improved it. This research was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001. Also supported by UNICAMP, Amazonas State Research Support Foundation - FAPEAM, Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM), and CNPq process 314174/2020-6
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Moreira, C.G., de França, B.B.N. & Conte, T.U. Analyzing the BizDev interface in an enterprise context: a case of developers acting in business. Empir Software Eng 28, 154 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10383-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10383-y