A Deep Dive on the Impact of COVID-19 in Software Development
It addresses the problem of understanding pandemic impacts on software development for researchers and practitioners, but is incremental as it builds on existing methods without major breakthroughs.
This study investigated the impact of COVID-19 on software projects and professionals by analyzing 100 GitHub projects and surveying 279 developers, finding that the effects on productivity, code quality, and wellbeing vary widely across individuals rather than being uniformly positive or negative.
Context: COVID-19 pandemic has impacted different business sectors around the world. Objective. This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 on software projects and software development professionals. Method: We conducted a mining software repository study based on 100 GitHub projects developed in Java using ten different metrics. Next, we surveyed 279 software development professionals for better understanding the impact of COVID-19 on daily activities and wellbeing. Results: We identified 12 observations related to productivity, code quality, and wellbeing. Conclusions: Our findings highlight that the impact of COVID-19 is not binary (reduce productivity vs. increase productivity) but rather a spectrum. For many of our observations, substantial proportions of respondents have differing opinions from each other. We believe that more research is needed to uncover specific conditions that cause certain outcomes to be more prevalent.