Software development companies organize hackathons to encourage innovation. Despite many benefits of hackathons, in large-scale agile organizations where many teams work together, stopping the ongoing work results in a significant decrease in the immediate output. Motivated by the need to understand whether and how to run hackathons, we investigated how the practice affects productivity on the individual and organizational levels. By mapping the benefits and challenges to an established productivity framework, we found that hackathons improve developers' satisfaction and well-being, strengthen the company culture, improve performance (as many ideas are tested), increase activity (as the ideas are developed quickly), and improve communication and collaboration (because the social network is strengthened). Addressing managerial concerns, we found that hackathons also increase efficiency and flow because people learn to complete work and make progress quickly, and they build new competence. Finally, with respect to virtual hackathons we found that developers work more in isolation because tasks are split between team members resulting in less collaboration. This means that some important, expected hackathon values in virtual contexts require extra effort and cannot be taken for granted.
翻译:尽管黑客开发公司组织黑客开发公司来鼓励创新。尽管黑客开发公司有许多好处,但在许多团队合作的大型灵活组织中,黑客开发公司阻止正在进行的工作导致即时产出大幅下降。出于了解是否和如何运行黑客开发公司的必要性,我们调查了这种做法如何影响个人和组织层面的生产力。通过绘制对既定生产力框架的好处和挑战图,我们发现黑客改进了开发商的满意度和福祉,加强了公司文化,改进了绩效(许多想法都经过测试 ), 增加了活动(想法发展得很快 ), 改进了沟通与合作(因为社会网络得到加强 ) 。 我们发现,黑客也提高了效率和流动,因为人们学会迅速完成工作和进步,并建立了新的能力。 最后,关于虚拟黑客开发者,我们发现他们的工作更加孤立,因为任务在团队成员之间分散,导致合作减少。这意味着虚拟环境中某些重要的、预期的黑客价值需要额外的努力,不能被视为理所当然。