A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers Working from Home during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ford, Denae; Storey, Margaret-Anne; Zimmermann, Thomas; Bird, Christian; Jaffe, Sonia; Maddila, Chandra; Butler, Jenna; Houck, Brian; Nagappan, Nachiappan

doi:10.1145/3487567

Cited by 116 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…There are lately several research projects that study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the way software developers work [44]- [47]. These papers try to relate practices adopted because of the pandemic, especially Working From Home (WFH), with the productivity and the well-being of software developers working on the usual software projects.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lessons Learned from the Development of a Mechanical Ventilator for COVID-19

Bombarda

Bonfanti

Galbiati

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE 32nd International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, many researchers all over the world have offered their time and competencies to face the heavy consequences of the disease. This is the case of a group of physicists, engineers, and physicians that around the middle of March 2020 started to develop a simplified mechanical lung ventilator, called MVM (Mechanical Ventilator Milano), to answer the high request of ventilators for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) in intensive care units. A prototype was ready in around one month.Since medical software malfunctions can lead to injuries or death of patients, before marketing MVM ventilators and distributing them in hospitals, software certification in accordance with the IEC 62304 standard was mandatory to guarantee system reliability. The team was then complemented by computer scientists specifically devoted to this task. The software reengineering process, which lasted around two months from the end of the prototype, brought to a strong re-implementation of the device software components, which involved all the stakeholders in a continuous integration setting.In this paper, we report the experience of the MVM control SW re-engineering necessary to show evidence that the SW adheres to the standards and to consequently obtain the certification. We share results and lessons learned from this social project, where more than 100 volunteer researchers worked towards software certification at the extreme of their strength to get a real device finished in a rush since strongly required to support physicians in treating COVID-19 patients.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lessons Learned from the Development of a Mechanical Ventilator for COVID-19

Bombarda

Bonfanti

Galbiati

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE 32nd International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)

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“…However, there is a statistical difference between respondents who are in a small team and those in a large team. [10]. The authors reported a mixed experience for software engineers when working from home, and for the same factor, one engineer can perceive a benefit and another can perceive it as a challenge.…”

Section: Po4 Po5 Po6mentioning

confidence: 98%

“…They concluded that perceived productivity has declined (admitting a marginal effect size) as a result of negatively affected well-being and that organizations need to accept that expecting normal productivity under crisis circumstances is unrealistic. Ford et al conducted a two-wave study on productivity in Microsoft [10]. Both surveys indicated that the productivity increased among some participants and stayed the same or decreased among the others, which led the authors to conclude that the productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic was dichotomous.…”

Section: Work From Home and Software Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dropbox too will let all employees work from home permanently 2 and Amazon has stated that employees whose positions allow them to work from home can do so two days a week 3 . While teleworking is not new in many organizational settings, recent studies in the context of COVID-19 agree that significant changes to the workplace or way of working will occur in post-pandemic times [10,11,12]. Organizations might face various configurations of WFH, from hybrid mode of office and online work to working from anywhere [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Work-from-home and its implication for project management, resilience and innovation -- a global survey on software companies

Nguyen-Duc¹,

Khanna²,

Greer³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Context] The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disruptive impact on how people work and collaborate across all global economic sectors, including software business. While remote working is not new for software engineers, forced Work-from-home situations come with both constraints, limitations and opportunities for individuals, software teams and software companies. As the "new normal" for working might be based on the current state of Work From Home (WFH), it is useful to understand what has happened and learn from that. [Objective] The goal of this study is to gain insights on how their WFH environment impacts software project and software companies. We are also interested in understanding if the impact differs between software startups and established companies. [Method] We conducted a global-scale, cross-sectional survey during spring and summer 2021. Our results are based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of 297 valid responses. [Results] We observed a mixed perception on the impact of WFH on software project management, resilience and innovation. Certain patterns on WFH, control and coordination mechanisms, and collaborative tools are observed globally. We find that team, agility and leadership are the three most important factors for achieving resilience during the pandemic. Although startups do not perceive the impact of WFH differently, there is a difference between engineers who work in a small team context and those who work in a large team context. [Conclusion] The result suggests a contingency approach in studying and improving WFH practices and environment in future software industry.

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“…A key question regarding exclusively-digital labor is whether a completely online workplace improves working conditions, particularly for those from marginalized socio-demographic and/or labor groups. Prior work has studied the experiences of office workers in formal labor arrangements switching to remote work during the pandemic [46,29,99,20,44,39,147] and the experiences of gig workers (who are part of the informal labor sector) who conduct digitally-mediated in-person work [31,106,105,8,102]. However, to our knowledge, no prior work has studied the experiences of informal labor sector workers who switched from in-person work to completely digital work, while continuing to do the same type of work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk, Resilience and Reward: Impacts of Shifting to Digital Sex Work

Hamilton¹,

Barakat²,

Redmiles³

2022

Preprint

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Workers from a variety of industries rapidly shifted to remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing work has examined the impact of this shift on office workers, little work has examined how shifting from in-person to online work affected workers in the informal labor sector. We examine the impact of shifting from in-person to online-only work on a particularly marginalized group of workers: sex workers. Through 34 qualitative interviews with sex workers from seven countries in the Global North, we examine how a shift to online-only sex work impacted:(1) working conditions, (2) risks and protective behaviors, and (3) labor rewards. We find that online work offers benefits to sex workers' financial and physical well-being. However, online-only work introduces new and greater digital and mental health risks as a result of the need to be publicly visible on more platforms and to share more explicit content. From our findings we propose design and platform governance suggestions for digital sex workers and for informal workers more broadly, particularly those who create and sell digital content.

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A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers Working from Home during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Cited by 116 publications

References 31 publications

Lessons Learned from the Development of a Mechanical Ventilator for COVID-19

Lessons Learned from the Development of a Mechanical Ventilator for COVID-19

Work-from-home and its implication for project management, resilience and innovation -- a global survey on software companies

Risk, Resilience and Reward: Impacts of Shifting to Digital Sex Work

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