skip to main content
10.1145/3422392.3422446acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessbesConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

From Dusk till Dawn: Reflections on the Impact of COVID-19 on the Development Practices of a R&D Project

Published: 21 December 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Responding to change over following a plan is one of the Agile Manifesto's values. According to its original perspective, development teams should embrace changes due to a better understanding of the business domain or about the users' needs. This kind of change is well understood and explored by practitioners and researchers. However, the issue of how development teams embrace changes due to unexpected, severe, and atypical external events (like the ones we are facing during COVID-19) have not been fully discussed. In this paper, we present our experience in managing the expectations and changing the development methods to mitigate the risks of carrying out a research and development project (named Virtual Social Office-VSO) during a pandemic time. To this end, we report on an observational study that explains the main differences between the procedures we expected to follow before the pandemic and the procedures we are following. We also present the perceptions of both stakeholder and development teams about the impact of COVID-19 on VSO development. Although the development team quickly adapted itself to work from home, we observed some impact on the development plans. In particular, trying to reconcile the trade-offs between completeness and the tight schedule for the first release was a challenge, since we depended on different partners to collect the information that we need to make available in a mobile application (app) that corresponds to one of the VSO project outcomes. According to one stakeholder, the initial effort to design and prototype the VSO app (using the Design Thinking approach) before the start of the pandemic, has been considered essential to mitigate part of the threats that arose due to the COVID-19. We discuss part of these threats in this paper and the actions we have been taking to mitigate them. In addition, according to members of the development team, working remotely presents both challenges (e.g., adapt to a new routine, prepare a comfortable place, isolation feelings), and benefits (e.g., working hours flexibility, less distraction from co-workers).

References

[1]
Titan M Alon, Matthias Doepke, Jane Olmstead-Rumsey, and Michele Tertilt. 2020. The impact of COVID-19 on gender equality. Technical Report. National Bureau of Economic Research.
[2]
Roy M Anderson, Hans Heesterbeek, Don Klinkenberg, and T Déirdre Hollingsworth. 2020. How will country-based mitigation measures influence the course of the COVID-19 epidemic? The Lancet 395, 10228 (2020), 931--934.
[3]
Lingfeng Bao, Tao Li, Xin Xia, Kaiyu Zhu, Hui Li, and Xiaohu Yang. 2020. How does Working from Home Affect Developer Productivity? - A Case Study of Baidu During COVID-19 Pandemic. CoRR abs/2005.13167 (2020), 1--11.
[4]
Louis-Philippe Béland, Abel Brodeur, and Taylor Wright. 2020. The short-term economic consequences of Covid-19: exposure to disease, remote work and government response. University of Ottawa - Department of Economics; IZA Institute of Labor Economics 13159 (2020), 1--92.
[5]
Angel Belzunegui-Eraso and Amaya Erro-Garcés. 2020. Teleworking in the Context of the Covid-19 Crisis. Sustainability 12, 9 (2020), 3662.
[6]
Kelly D Blake, Robert J Blendon, and Kasisomayajula Viswanath. 2010. Employment and compliance with pandemic influenza mitigation recommendations. Emerging infectious diseases 16, 2 (2010), 212.
[7]
M Bruce and PA Pereira. 2019. Microservices in Action. Manning Publications Co., 978--1617294457.
[8]
Scott Chacon and Ben Straub. 2014. Pro Git (2nd ed.). Apress, USA.
[9]
Bonnie Eisenman. 2016. Learning React Native: Building Native Mobile Apps with JavaScript (1st ed.). O'Reilly Media, Inc., B076PWRYSS.
[10]
Paul Ralph et al. 2020. Pandemic Programming: How COVID-19 affects software developers and how their organizations can help. CoRR abs/2005.01127 (2020), 1--32.
[11]
Robert Feldt and Thomas Zimmermann. 2020. ESE Special Issue on COVID-19 and Software Engineering.
[12]
Luciano A. Garcia, Edson OliveiraJr, Gislaine C. L. Leal, and Marcelo Morandini. 2020. On the Adaptations of the Scrum Framework Software Development Events: Literature and Practitioners Analysis using Feature Models. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, ICEIS 2020, Prague, Czech Republic, May 5-7, 2020, Volume 2. SCITEPRESS, 978-989-758-423-7, 416--423. https://doi.org/10.5220/0009578904160423
[13]
Jennifer Hehn, Daniel Méndez, Falk Uebernickel, Walter Brenner, and Manfred Broy. 2020. On Integrating Design Thinking for Human-Centered Requirements Engineering. IEEE Softw. 37, 2 (2020), 25--31.
[14]
Hadi Hemmati, Sarah Nadi, Olga Baysal, Oleksii Kononenko, Wei Wang, Reid Holmes, and Michael W. Godfrey. 2013. The MSR cookbook: mining a decade of research. In Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR '13, San Francisco, CA, USA, May 18-19, 2013, Thomas Zimmermann, Massimiliano Di Penta, and Sunghun Kim (Eds.). IEEE Computer Society, https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR.2013.6624048, 343--352. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR.2013.6624048
[15]
Siw Elisabeth Hove and Bente Anda. 2005. Experiences from Conducting Semistructured Interviews in Empirical Software Engineering Research. In IEEE METRICS. IEEE Computer Society, 10.1109/METRICS.2005.24, 23.
[16]
James Lewis and Martin Fowler. 2014. Microservices. https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html
[17]
Ting-Peng Liang, Yu-Wen Wang, and Ping-Ju Wu. 2013. A System for Service Blueprint Design. In ICSSI. IEEE Computer Society, 10.1109/ICSSI.2013.52, 252--253.
[18]
Verne W Loose, Vanessa N Vargas, Drake E Warren, Shirley J Starks, Theresa J Brown, and Braeton J Smith. 2010. Economic and policy implications of pandemic influenza. Report SAND2010-1910, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico March 1910 (2010), 1--22.
[19]
Terri Rebmann. 2009. Infectious disease disasters: bioterrorism, emerging infections, and pandemics. APIC text of infection control and epidemiology. 3rd ed. Washington, DC: Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc 1 (2009), 1--22.
[20]
Ken Schwaber. 2004. Agile Project Management with Scrum. Microsoft Press, USA.
[21]
Daniel Spurk and Caroline Straub. 2020. Flexible employment relationships and careers in times of the COVID-19 pandemic.
[22]
Craig Walls. 2016. Spring Boot in Action (1st ed.). Manning Publications Co., USA.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Impact of Work from Home on Agile Software Project Execution -- The Empirical StudyProceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Information Systems Development10.62036/ISD.2024.65Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Challenges, adaptations, and fringe benefits of conducting software engineering research with human participants during the COVID-19 pandemicEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10490-429:4Online publication date: 7-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Navigating Remote Work: Challenges and Adaptations of Agile Teams Amidst Covid-19Enterprise Information Systems10.1007/978-3-031-64748-2_4(66-94)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
SBES '20: Proceedings of the XXXIV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
October 2020
901 pages
ISBN:9781450387538
DOI:10.1145/3422392
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

  • SBC: Brazilian Computer Society

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 December 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

SBES '20

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 147 of 427 submissions, 34%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)23
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 20 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Impact of Work from Home on Agile Software Project Execution -- The Empirical StudyProceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Information Systems Development10.62036/ISD.2024.65Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Challenges, adaptations, and fringe benefits of conducting software engineering research with human participants during the COVID-19 pandemicEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10490-429:4Online publication date: 7-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Navigating Remote Work: Challenges and Adaptations of Agile Teams Amidst Covid-19Enterprise Information Systems10.1007/978-3-031-64748-2_4(66-94)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Tuhm: A Tool for Supporting Usability Tests on Mobile ApplicationsProceedings of the XIX Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems10.1145/3592813.3592923(340-347)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
  • (2023)Investigating the Perceived Impact of Maternity on Software Engineering: a Women’s Perspective2023 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE)10.1109/CHASE58964.2023.00023(138-149)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2023)Hybrid Work Practices and Strategies in Software Engineering-Emerging Software Developer ExperiencesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.332293411(112861-112876)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)Impact in Software Engineering Activities After One Year of COVID-19 Restrictions for Startups and Established CompaniesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.327991711(55178-55203)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)Using a Teamwork Quality Instrument to Improve Agile Teams’ Effectiveness: Practical Use CasesAgile Methods10.1007/978-3-031-25648-6_1(3-17)Online publication date: 31-Jan-2023
  • (2022)ICT Practitioners’ Perception of Working from Home During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Exploring Gender DifferencesProceedings of the XXXVI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3555228.3555248(47-57)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2022
  • (2022)The who, what and how of the current research at the Brazilian Symposium on Software EngineeringProceedings of the XXXVI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3555228.3555241(11-20)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2022
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media