The State of Agile Software Development Teams During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 forced Agile Software Development Teams (ASDT) to rapidly transition to remote work and adapt to new business circumstances. The focus of this research was to investigate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on ASDT work and what tools and metrics are used by ASDT. A global survey was performed with 120 answers from different software engineering teams. The results of the research indicate that the work of ASDT wasn't significantly impacted. Most of the ASDT had experience with working in a distributed or remote environment. Therefore, most of the ASDT were able to transitioned to full remote work. Results indicate the Covid-19 pandemic didn't have much impact on Product Backlog and Vision. Moreover, most ASDT didn't change their Definition of Done and release frequency, indicating that the pace and quality of work wasn't disturbed during the Covid-19 pandemic. The few ASDT that changed their work organization did it together with changes to Product Backlog and Vision. Results indicate that the prevalence of distributed teams and remote work among ASDT helped with the transition to fully remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, this article presents gathered data of popularity of different online cooperation tools and metrics used by ASDT.

The Impact of Covid 19 on Agile Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In four studies, single, multiple, or longitude case studies with a qualitative approach were used. Da Camara et [38] Qualitative (multiple) case study [39,40,41,42] Quantitative survey [43,44,45,46,47] Table 3. Overview of the used research designs literature review.…”

“…Overview of the used research designs literature review. Seven primary studies were published in conference proceedings ( [38,39,40,42,43,44], the remaining six were published in journals [36,37,41,45,46,47].…”

“…Agile software development Teams implement the virtualization of the work with the help of tools. Three studies show that the majority of agile software development teams use Microsoft Teams for virtual communication and collaboration [40,44,47]. Also, Slack, Zoom, and Google Hangouts are in use.…”

Game-based Sprint retrospectives: multiple action research

“…Recently, online tools for running remote retrospectives have gained in importance due to the COVID-19 pandemic that has reshaped the way software engineers work (Butt et al 2021b ; Griffin 2021 ; Marek et al 2021 ; Neumann et al 2021 ). Thereby, we call for future work to investigate retrospective games in the context of virtual retrospectives with a distributed team.…”

Challenges (and Opportunities!) of a Remote Agile Software Engineering Project Course During COVID-19

“…In a survey of 120 participants, Marek et al studied Agile software development teams which transitioned to fully remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic [32]. The survey revealed that the majority of responding Agile teams were already, at least partially, distributed.…”