Gunnar Rye Bergersen

About

My research concerns the acquisition and measurement of professional software developer skills. I am also interested in research on broader abilities, expertise in general, motivation, and team performance. Thus, from a product-process-resource perspective, I focus on the latter (even though "resource" is a horrific term for developers).

Selected publications

• Scientific articles and book chapters
• Stray, Viktoria; Moe, Nils Brede; Bergersen, Gunnar R. & Kirkerud, Jeanette (2024). Behavioral Aspects of Agile Software Development: A Case Study on Meeting Practices. In Bui, Tung X. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). ISSN 9780998133171. p. 7720–7729. doi: 10.24251/HICSS.2023.926. Full text in Research Archive Show summary In FinTech organizations, there are trends toward employing agile methods, moving away from legacy monolithic technical architecture to microservices architecture, and focusing on collaboration and autonomy to boost innovation. When software teams have end-to-end responsibility and decision-making authority, they avoid handovers between teams and can develop software more quickly. Furthermore, effective coordination through meetings and digital collaboration tools is important for the success of the development of software applications. We conducted a case study in a large FinTech organization to understand behavioral aspects of software development and, specifically, their meeting practices. The results show that employees spend nearly half of their workday in meetings, posing challenges to productivity and availability. Strategies to reduce interruptions include blocking time in calendars, grouping meetings, and using digital tools such as Slack. Our findings indicate that achieving a balance between collaborative activities and uninterrupted work is not only challenging but essential in software development organizations. Consequently, it is important that team members discuss and actively experiment with various strategies to optimize this balance.
• Kobialka, Paul; Pferscher, Andrea; Bergersen, Gunnar R.; Johnsen, Einar Broch & Tarifa, Silvia Lizeth Tapia (2024). Stochastic Games for User Journeys. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). ISSN 0302-9743. 14934. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-71177-0_12. Full text in Research Archive
• Kobialka, Paul; Tarifa, Silvia Lizeth Tapia; Bergersen, Gunnar R. & Johnsen, Einar Broch (2024). User journey games: automating user-centric analysis. Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM). ISSN 1619-1366. doi: 10.1007/s10270-024-01148-2. Full text in Research Archive Show summary The servitization of business is moving industry to business models driven by customer demand. Customer satisfaction is connected with financial rewards, forcing companies to invest in their users’ experience. User journeys describe how users maneuver through a service. Today, user journeys are typically modeled graphically, and lack formalization and analysis support. This paper proposes a formalization of user journeys as weighted games between the user and the service provider and a systematic data-driven method to derive these user journey games from system logs, using process mining techniques. As the derived games may contain cycles, we define an algorithm to transform user journeys games with cycles into acyclic weighted games, which can be model checked using to uncover potential challenges in a company’s interactions with its users and derive company strategies to guide users through their journeys. Finally, we propose a user journey sliding-window analysis to detect changes in the user journey over time by model checking a sequence of generated games. Our analysis pipeline has been evaluated on an industrial case study; it revealed design challenges within the studied service and could be used to derive actionable recommendations for improvement.
• Kobialka, Paul; Schlatte, Rudolf; Bergersen, Gunnar R.; Johnsen, Einar Broch & Tarifa, Silvia Lizeth Tapia (2024). Simulating User Journeys with Active Objects. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). ISSN 0302-9743. 14360, p. 199–225. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-51060-1_8. Full text in Research Archive Show summary The servitization of business makes companies increasingly dependent on providing carefully designed user experiences for their service offerings. User journeys model services from the user’s perspective, but user journeys are today mainly constructed and analyzed manually. Recent work analyzing user journeys as games enable optimal service-provider strategies to be automatically derived, assuming a restricted user behavior. Complementing this work, we here develop an actor-based modeling framework for user journeys that is parametric in user behavior and service-provider strategies, using the active-object modeling language ABS. Strategies for the service provider, such as those derived for user journey games, can be automatically imported into the framework. Our work enables prescriptive simulation-based analyses, as strategies can be evaluated and compared in scenarios with rich user behavior.
• Sjøberg, Dag & Bergersen, Gunnar Rye (2023). Improving the Reporting of Threats to Construct Validity. In Babar, Muhammad Ali (Eds.), EASE '23: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ISSN 9798400700446. doi: 10.1145/3593434.3593449. Full text in Research Archive Show summary Background: Construct validity concerns the use of indicators to measure a concept that is not directly measurable. Aim: This study intends to identify, categorize, assess and quantify discussions of threats to construct validity in empirical software engineering literature and use the findings to suggest ways to improve the reporting of construct validity issues. Method: We analyzed 83 articles that report human-centric experiments published in five top-tier software engineering journals from 2015 to 2019. The articles’ text concerning threats to construct validity was divided into segments (the unit of analysis) based on predefined categories. The segments were then evaluated regarding whether they clearly discussed a threat and a construct. Results: Three-fifths of the segments were associated with topics not related to construct validity. Two-thirds of the articles discussed construct validity without using the definition of construct validity given in the article. The threats were clearly described in more than four-fifths of the segments, but the construct in question was clearly described in only two-thirds of the segments. The construct was unclear when the discussion was not related to construct validity but to other types of validity. Conclusions: The results show potential for improving the understanding of construct validity in software engineering. Recommendations addressing the identified weaknesses are given to improve the awareness and reporting of CV.
• Sjøberg, Dag & Bergersen, Gunnar Rye (2022). Construct Validity in Software Engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. ISSN 0098-5589. 49(3), p. 1374–1396. doi: 10.1109/TSE.2022.3176725. Full text in Research Archive
• Kobialka, Paul; Tarifa, Silvia Lizeth Tapia; Bergersen, Gunnar R. & Johnsen, Einar Broch (2022). Weighted Games for User Journeys. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). ISSN 0302-9743. 13550, p. 253–270. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-17108-6_16. Full text in Research Archive
• Gjelsten, Børge Kile; Bergersen, Gunnar R.; Sjøberg, Dag & Cutts, Quintin (2021). No Gender Difference in CS1 Grade for Students with Programming from High School: An Exploratory Study, Koli Calling '21: Proceedings of the 21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research. ACM Digital Library. ISSN 9781450384889. doi: 10.1145/3488042.3488071. Full text in Research Archive