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.
@article{arxiv.2008.07048,
title = {A Deep Dive on the Impact of COVID-19 in Software Development},
author = {Paulo Anselmo da Mota Silveira Neto and Umme Ayda Mannan and Eduardo Santana de Almeida and Nachiappan Nagappan and David Lo and Pavneet Singh Kochhar and Cuiyun Gao and Iftekhar Ahmed},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.07048},
year = {2022}
}