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Crunch time: The reasons and effects of unpaid overtime in the games industry
Chalmers, Sweden.
Chalmers, Sweden.
Chalmers, Sweden.
RISE - Research Institutes of Sweden, ICT, Viktoria.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-1811-0123
2017 (English)In: Proceedings - 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice Track, ICSE-SEIP 2017, 2017, p. 43-52Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

The games industry is notorious for its intense work ethics with uncompensated overtime and weekends at the office, also known as crunch or crunch time. Since crunch time is so common within the industry, is it possible that the benefits of crunch time outweigh the disadvantages? By studying postmortems and conducting interviews with employees in the industry, we aim to characterise crunch time and discover its effects on the industry. We provide a classification of crunch, i.e., four types of crunch which all have distinct characteristics and affect the product, employees and schedule in various ways. One of the crunch types stands out from the others by only having positive effects on product and schedule. A characteristic that all of the types have in common is an increase in stress levels amongst the employees. We identify a set of reasons for crunch and show that crunch is less pronounced in game studios where prioritisation of features is a regular practice.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2017. p. 43-52
Keywords [en]
Agile development, Games industry, Human factors, Stress, Sustainable pace, Types of crunch, Unpaid overtime, Engineering, Human engineering, Industrial engineering, Stresses, Stress levels, Work ethics, Software engineering
National Category
Natural Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-30861DOI: 10.1109/ICSE-SEIP.2017.18Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85025833031ISBN: 9781538627174 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-30861DiVA, id: diva2:1139347
Conference
39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice Track, ICSE-SEIP 2017, 20 May 2017 through 28 May 2017
Available from: 2017-09-07 Created: 2017-09-07 Last updated: 2023-05-19Bibliographically approved

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Burden, Håkan

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Total: 221 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf