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

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world to its core and has provoked an overnight exodus of developers that normally worked in an office setting to working from home. The magnitude of this shift and the factors that have accompanied this new unplanned work setting go beyond what the software engineering community has previously understood to be remote work. To find out how developers and their productivity were affected, we distributed two surveys (with 3,634 responses)-weeks apart to understand the presence and prevalence of the benefits, challenges, and opportunities to improve this special circumstance of remote work. From our thematic qualitative analysis and statistical quantitative analysis, we find that there is a dichotomy of developer experiences influenced by many different factors (that for some are a benefit, while for others a challenge). For example, a benefit for some was being close to family members but for others having family members share their working space and interrupting their focus, was a challenge. Our surveys led to powerful narratives from respondents and revealed the scale at which these experiences exist to provide insights as to how the future of (pandemic) remote work can evolve.

Pandemic Software Development: The Student Experiences from Developing a COVID-19 Information Dashboard

“…2) Challenges and Growth: Prior studies on professional developers identified several challenges stemming from working from home during the pandemic, such as a poor work environment, poor work-life balance, and difficulties in collaborating [8], [10]. While these issues were also present in the student team, they were reported to a less significant degree.…”

“…While these issues were also present in the student team, they were reported to a less significant degree. We also observed that the students had to balance their academic commitments, similar to professional developers balancing external commitments such as family [2], [8]. Students who participate in such projects may be more adept at handling multiple responsibilities when entering the professional environment, which is supported by increased confidence in their task prioritization abilities.…”

“…The complete list of the questions is available at [23]. The survey questions were mainly formulated based on the existing literature (e.g., [8], [16], [24]) and our pilot study (i.e., analyzing the students' discussions on Slack and GitHub). The survey started with a brief overview of our research objective.…”

“…Challenges. We used 10 statements (i.e., some of them adopted from [8], [24]) to measure to what extent students agreed or disagreed with the potential challenges (if any) that may have occurred during their work on the COVID-19 project. The statements were rated based on a six-point Likert scale (from "Strongly agree" to "Strongly disagree").…”

“…Other researchers focus on how the pandemic has influenced educational institutions and their instructional strategies (e.g., [5]- [7]). A growing number of the literature [2], [8]- [15] has started looking into the consequences of the pandemic on the software development process (e.g., the effects of relocating into a new working environment with working from home [8]). These works investigate the problems, motivations, and experiences of practicing professionals.…”