ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has lasted for over 1 year. During the pandemic, several software development companies migrated to working from home (WFH). Several studies have recorded an initial moment of adaptation to WFH. This study investigated how BRAian software development teams dealt with WFH after 1 year of a pandemic and how this change in work was on the software development process. We applied a survey with 67 participants of software development teams and investigated aspects, as: work routine, collaboration, communication, productivity, financial assistance and software development process. We performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the survey results and compared them with previous studies. Our key findings are: (i) 56.71% of the participants said that it has an impact on the work routine related to work overload and exceeds the company's standard hours;(ii) 92.54% of the participants consider their team to be collaborative;(iii) 82.70% are satisfied with the communication at WFH;(iv) 86.55% has meetings once or twice a day;(v) 59.7% had an improvement in productivity in WFH and 75% are satisfied with their productivity;(vi) 79.60% receive some assistance from the company for WFH;(vii) 82.1% said that the company intends or probably intends to continue in the WFH, and (viii) 55.2% said they had changed in the software development process due to WFH. The main positive changes in the process are related to the practices of: daily meetings, agile processes, code review, pair programming and code versioning. © 2021 ACM.
ABSTRACT
Software companies have adopted remote work to maintain practitioners safe during the COVID-19 outbreak worldwide. The remote environment in pandemic time brings some challenges, mainly for practitioners with limited experience with this work modality. Moreover, there are several factors in the environment that together with the change in the work routine can directly impact the teams productivity, such as human and organizational factors. To investigate this problem, we conducted a survey applied to software teams in Brazil to analyze how such factors can influence their productivity in the remote environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey was guided by human and organizational factors identified in the literature that affect the productivity of software teams, such as: work environment, collaboration and organization of teams, communication, motivation, among others. Our survey obtained 58 participants from all Brazilian regions. As main conclusions, we identified that 74.1% of the participants consider their productivity remains good or excellent, and 84.5% feel motivated and have easy communication with their co-workers. Furthermore, the main factors influencing the productivity are external interruption, environment adaptation, and emotional issues. © 2020 ACM.