The introduction of OfficeTown, a generative simulation framework for professional organizations in which tasks and their context arise from continuing organizational work, highlights the value of organizational simulation in generating work-grounded data and environments for the continued development of generalist agents.
Abstract
AI agents increasingly use files and software tools to produce professional deliverables. Such work draws on materials, decisions, and feedback accumulated across assignments. We introduce OfficeTown, a generative simulation framework for professional organizations in which tasks and their context arise from continuing organizational work. From a natural-language description of an organization's purpose and activities, OfficeTown initializes an organization whose members coordinate work, delegate bounded assignments to assistant agents, and review their deliverables. Artifacts, decisions, and unresolved matters persist and shape subsequent work, while responsibilities and permissions determine what each member can see and do. We curate work requests, their context, and review feedback into executable resources for evaluation and learning. We construct OfficeTown Bench with 406 tasks and 4,836 evaluation criteria from 23 simulated organizations across eight professional domains, incorporating domain-expert feedback. Frontier-model evaluations reveal substantial remaining headroom. Supervised fine-tuning and on-policy distillation on OfficeTown data substantially improve Qwen3.5-9B on external professional-work benchmarks, including GDPval. Supplementary evaluations show that the principal--assistant harness achieves higher scores than the single- and multi-agent baselines tested. These results highlight the value of organizational simulation in generating work-grounded data and environments for the continued development of generalist agents.
This publication proposes a definition and a classification of agile software development approaches and analyses ten software development methods that can be characterized as being "agile" against the defined criterion.
P. Abrahamsson, O. Salo, Jussi Ronkainen et al.· arXiv.org· 727 citations· ⚡54
The study shows that agile practices improve both informal and formal communication, but indicates that, in larger development situations involving multiple external stakeholders, a mismatch of adequate communication mechanisms can sometimes even hinder the communication.
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The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.
Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· Information and Software Tec...· 394 citations· ⚡54
The results show that the embedded industry has been able to apply agile methods in its development processes and that the appreciation of the agile methods and their individual practices appears to increase once adopted and applied in practice.
O. Salo, P. Abrahamsson· IET Software· 238 citations· ⚡9
Consequences of happiness and unhappiness that are beneficial and detrimental for developers' mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts are found.
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The Mobile-D approach is briefly outlined here and the experiences gained from four case studies are discussed, which helped develop an agile development approach for mobile application development.
P. Abrahamsson, Antti Hanhineva, H. Hulkko et al.· Conference on Object-Oriente...· 225 citations· ⚡18
StudentSim is a research system for evaluating and improving AI tutoring tools before they are tested with learners. It models how individuals may engage with tutors, giving feedback to improve tutor performance across subjects like chess, writing, and mathematics. The post Simulating student learning for better AI tutoring appeared first on Microsoft Research.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduOct 6, 2026
Writing as a participant and researcher, PhD student JS Tan SM ’22 has co-authored a new book about the rise of tech worker protests and the employer backlash that followed.
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