TO: Prof. Ellis
FROM: Benson Huang
DATE: 3/3/2021
SUBJECT: 500-Word Summary of Article on Covid-19’s effect on Software Developers
The following is a 500-word summary of a peer-reviewed article about how they investigate the effects of the pandemic on developers’ wellbeing and productivity through surveys. Covid-19 is declared a pandemic by WHO on March 11th which resulted in lockdowns and as such many were either laid off or told to work from home. Being forced to work at home without preparing there were many problems and issues rose. According to the authors “People are less likely to comply when they are facing a loss of income, personal logistical problems, isolation, and psychological stress (as cited in DiGiovanni et al. 2004)”. Smaller businesses will try to stay open and people with basic needs at risk are less likely to comply with efforts. After the pandemic we will find more businesses allowing remote working. However, this is not practical for every business as some must work in-store and some do not have a dedicated workspace at home. There are reports of remote working being more productive but some of these reports are self-reports which may be biased. Measuring productivity for software developers is difficult as different lines of code can have varying effects on their program. Yet some companies still use it as a measure for their software developers. It has been found that software developers’ well-being is closely related to job satisfaction so keeping them happy is important. A questionnaire was sent out to collect data to find if they supported some hypotheses. The target of the study was software developers who use to work in an office but now work at home, but the survey was open to all software developers. The survey is fully anonymous with a filter question for people who did not meet the requirements. Although there was no cash for doing the survey, the authors offered to donate to an open-source project of the persons choice. To get as many responses as possible the survey was advertised on many websites, had the translation for different countries and for some countries a different website had to be used because google was blocked. According to the authors “We received 2668 total responses of which 439 did not meet our inclusion criteria and 4 were effectively blank leaving 2225” (Ralph et al., 2020, p. 4940) showing that 2 of the hypotheses were supported. Some interesting patterns were found one of which was that if someone was isolated, they tend to be more afraid. Some patterns were consistent with studies of SARS back in 2004. Overall, the results showed that software developers working from home are showing less productivity and wellbeing. As such normal productivity rates during pandemics should not be expected and employees should just accept the fact that they cannot output as much work. Some things to note about the survey Google form is blocked in some countries so an alternative is needed, working with international teams for a multilanguage survey can generate large samples, COVID-19 is creating strains on businesses, organizations, and people.
Reference
Ralph, P., Baltes, S., Adisaputri, G., Torkar, R., Kovalenko, V., Kalinowski, M., Novielli, N., Yoo, S., Devroey, X., Tan, X., Zhou, M., Turhan, B., Hoda, R., Hata, H., Milani Fard, A., & Alkadhi, R. (2020). Pandemic programming. Empirical Software Engineering, 25(6), 4927–4961. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-020-09875-y
