ABSTRACT
Background: Listening to music is a common practice among software developers. Music listening after work can help release work-related stress;while listening to music at work can improve work efficiency and make tedious work more enjoyable. The working environment of developers in the past few years has changed dramatically due to the vast adoption of remote and hybrid work policies. Aims: We aim to understand how listening to music at work affects remote developers' perceived productivity and creativity. Method: We investigated 130 software developers and collected their music listening habits during remote work in a questionnaire. We studied the impact of listening to music on developers' creativity and productivity while working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: Our survey data suggests that developers generally feel more productive and creative when listening to music during remote working conditions. Conclusion: We found that developers who listen to music feel more productive and creative while working remotely due to reducing environment distractions. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.
ABSTRACT
This document describes the survey instruments from our paper "How Was Your Weekend?" Software Development Teams Working From Home During COVID-19 as well as how to access them.
ABSTRACT
Communication is essential for the success of student and professional software engineering (SE) team development projects. The projects delivered by SE courses provide valuable learning experiences for students because they teach industry-required skills such as teamwork, communication, and scheduling. Professional SE teams have adopted communication software such as Slack, Miro, Microsoft Teams, and GitHub Discussions to share files and convey information between team members. Likewise, they have distributed software development tools such as Visual Studio CodeSpaces and Jira to support productivity. In contrast, within academia, students have focused on having face-to-face meetings for team communication and communication tools for file sharing. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, universities have been forced to switch to an online or hybrid modality abruptly, thus compelling SE students to quickly adopt communication software. This paper proposes a study on the use of communication software in industry to prepare students for remote software development positions after graduation. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The mass shift to working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the way many software development teams collaborate and communicate. To investigate how team culture and team productivity may also have been affected, we conducted two surveys at a large software company. The first, an exploratory survey during the early months of the pandemic with 2,265 developer responses, revealed that many developers faced challenges reaching milestones and that their team productivity had changed. We also found through qualitative analysis that important team culture factors such as communication and social connection had been affected. For example, the simple phrase "How was your weekend?" had become a subtle way to show peer support. In our second survey, we conducted a quantitative analysis of the team cultural factors that emerged from our first survey to understand the prevalence of the reported changes. From 608 developer responses, we found that 74% of these respondents missed social interactions with colleagues and 51% reported a decrease in their communication ease with colleagues. We used data from the second survey to build a regression model to identify important team culture factors for modeling team productivity. We found that the ability to brainstorm with colleagues, difficulty communicating with colleagues, and satisfaction with interactions from social activities are important factors that are associated with how developers report their software development team's productivity. Our findings inform how managers and leaders in large software companies can support sustained team productivity during times of crisis and beyond.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the way that software development teams onboard new hires. Previously, most software developers worked in physical offices and new hires onboarded to their teams in the physical office, following a standard onboarding process. However, when companies transitioned employees to work from home due to the pandemic, there was little to no time to develop new onboarding procedures. In this paper, we present a survey of 267 new hires at Microsoft that onboarded to software development teams during the pandemic. We explored their remote onboarding process, including the challenges that the new hires encountered and their social connectedness with their teams. We found that most developers onboarded remotely and never had an opportunity to meet their teammates in person. This leads to one of the biggest challenges faced by these new hires, building a strong social connection with their team. We use these results to provide recommendations for onboarding remote hires.
ABSTRACT
There are many benefits of migrating applications to the cloud, including highly available and elastic compute power, unlimited backup and storage, fully managed services, and overall cost savings. However, there are many challenges that software engineers face when migrating applications to the cloud. Even more challenges during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of this paper is to shed light on the challenges software engineers face performing cloud migrations during a global pandemic. A proposed set of research questions will be used to determine the challenges remote software engineers face, as well as the tools and methodologies used during the cloud migration process. Future work will consist of building a process model by examining the current state of cloud migration approaches as well as new approaches due to a global pandemic. © 2020 IEEE.