  Hackathons are events in which diverse teams work together to explore, and
develop solutions, software or even ideas. Hackathons have been recognized not
only as public events for hacking, but also as a corporate mechanism for
innovation. Hackathons are a way for established companies to achieve increased
employee wellbeing as well as being a curator for innovation and developing new
products. Sudden transition to the work-from-home mode caused by the COVID-19
pandemic first put many corporate events requiring collocation, such as
hackathons, temporarily on hold and then motivated companies to find ways to
hold these events virtually. In this paper, we report our findings from
investigating hackathons in the context of a large agile company by first
exploring the general benefits and challenges of hackathons and then trying to
understand how they were affected by the virtual setup. We conducted nine
interviews, surveyed 23 employees and analyzed a hackathon demo. We found that
hackathons provide both individual and organizational benefits of innovation,
personal interests, and acquiring new skills and competences. Several
challenges such as added stress due to stopping the regular work, employees
fearing not having enough contribution to deliver and potential mismatch
between individual and organizational goals were also found. With respect to
the virtual setup, we found that virtual hackathons are not diminishing the
innovation benefits, however, some negative effect surfaced on the social and
networking side.

Software Engineering