A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers Working from Home during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Denae Ford, Margaret‐Anne Storey, Thomas Zimmermann, Christian Bird, Sonia Jaffe, Chandra Maddila +3 more
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world to its core and has provoked an overnight exodus of developers who 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 a combined total of 3,634 responses that answered all required questions) 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