skip to main content
10.1145/3571473.3571498acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessbqsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

The migration from forced remote work to hybrid work and its impacts on software quality: the case of a multinational company

Published: 27 January 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Context: many tech companies have had to adapt their software development processes to the reality of forced remote work due to COVID-19. Later, many of these companies transitioned to hybrid work, interspersing remote work with face-to-face work. Goal: this article aims to understand the challenges and impacts of this transition to software quality and to create hybrid software development teams. Method: an empirical study was carried out in the technology department of a Brazilian multinational company, using a multivocal literature review combined with a field study with semi-structured interviews and discursive textual analysis. Results: this study identified three main dimensions of the impact of the transition from remote to hybrid model: people, processes, and organization. In each of them, specific items were identified and will be detailed in this article. Conclusions: permanent or hybrid remote work models have enormous challenges and require studies in the specific scenarios of each company. It is necessary to understand these challenges to propose solutions that simultaneously facilitate the work of teams and guarantee the quality of the projects.

References

[1]
Pernilla Ågren, Eli Knoph, and Richard Berntsson Svensson. 2022. Agile software development one year into the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirical Software Engineering 27, 6 (2022), 1–50.
[2]
Alsones Balestrin and Kadigia Faccin. 2017. Inovação e Colaboracao: Estudos na Indústria de Semicondutores.
[3]
Elizabeth Bjarnason, Baldvin Gislason Bern, and Linda Svedberg. 2018. A Case Study of Distances in a Large Co-Located Software Development Organisation. In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (Gothenburg, Sweden) (CHASE ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1145/3195836.3195846
[4]
I. Bogoch, Alexander Watts, Andrea Thomas-Bachli, Carmen Huber, Moritz Kraemer, and Kamran Khan. 2020. Pneumonia of Unknown Etiology in Wuhan, China: Potential for International Spread Via Commercial Air Travel. Journal of travel medicine 27 (01 2020). https://doi.org/10.1093/jtm/taaa008
[5]
Erran Carmel. 1999. Global software teams: collaborating across borders and time zones. Prentice Hall PTR.
[6]
Marcelo Cataldo and James D Herbsleb. 2008. Communication patterns in geographically distributed software development and engineers’ contributions to the development effort. In Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering. 25–28.
[7]
Tarun Khanna Christos A. Makridis Choudhury, Prithwiraj and Kyle Schirmann. 2022. Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment - Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 22-063. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/22-063_639195cc-e7b5-47d3-9281-62d192c5b916.pdf
[8]
K Alec Chrystal, Paul D Mizen, and PD Mizen. 2003. Goodhart’s Law: its origins, meaning and implications for monetary policy. Central banking, monetary theory and practice: Essays in honour of Charles Goodhart 1(2003), 221–243.
[9]
D. De Masi. 1999. O futuro do trabalho: fadiga e ócio na sociedade pós-industrial. Jose Olympio. https://books.google.com.br/books?id=6foX_gAACAAJ
[10]
D. De Masi. 2020. Smart working: La rivoluzione del lavoro intelligente. Marsilio. https://books.google.com.br/books?id=imgCEAAAQBAJ
[11]
Ronnie E. de Souza Santos and Paul Ralph. 2022. A Grounded Theory of Coordination in Remote-First and Hybrid Software Teams. In Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) (ICSE ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 25–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3510003.3510105
[12]
Uwe FLICK. 2009. Introdução à pesquisa qualitativa :(3. ed ed.). Artmed, Porto Alegre :.
[13]
Denae Ford, Margaret-Anne Storey, Thomas Zimmermann, Christian Bird, Sonia Jaffe, Chandra Maddila, Jenna L Butler, Brian Houck, and Nachiappan Nagappan. 2021. A tale of two cities: Software developers working from home during the covid-19 pandemic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 31, 2(2021), 1–37.
[14]
Vahid Garousi, Michael Felderer, and Mika V. Mäntylä. 2016. The Need for Multivocal Literature Reviews in Software Engineering: Complementing Systematic Literature Reviews with Grey Literature. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (Limerick, Ireland) (EASE ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 26, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/2915970.2916008
[15]
Vahid Garousi, Michael Felderer, and Mika V. Mäntylä. 2019. Guidelines for including grey literature and conducting multivocal literature reviews in software engineering. Information and Software Technology 106 (2019), 101–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2018.09.006
[16]
Daniel Goßen. 2020. Design and implementation of a stealthy OpenWPM web scraper. https://www.cs.ru.nl/bachelors-theses/2020/Daniel_Go%C3%9Fen___4751051___Design_and_implementation_of_a_stealthy_OpenWPM_web_scraper.pdf
[17]
Daniel Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson. 2015. How do you feel, developer? An explanatory theory of the impact of affects on programming performance. PeerJ Computer Science 1(2015), e18.
[18]
James Herbsleb. 2009. Technical perspective Maintaining quality in the face of distributed development. Commun. ACM 52, 8 (2009), 84–84.
[19]
James D Herbsleb. 2007. Global software engineering: The future of socio-technical coordination. In Future of Software Engineering (FOSE’07). IEEE, 188–198.
[20]
James D. Herbsleb and Audris Mockus. 2003. An empirical study of speed and communication in globally distributed software development. IEEE Transactions on software engineering 29, 6 (2003), 481–494.
[21]
MIT Technology Review Insights. 2022. Shaping the future of hybrid work. https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Shaping-the-future-of-hybrid-work.pdf
[22]
Denise Jodelet. 2001. As representações sociais. EdUERJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
[23]
Fernando Kamei, Igor Wiese, Crescencio Lima, Ivanilton Polato, Vilmar Nepomuceno, Waldemar Ferreira, Márcio Ribeiro, Carolline Pena, Bruno Cartaxo, Gustavo Pinto, and Sérgio Soares. 2021. Grey Literature in Software Engineering: A critical review. Information and Software Technology 138 (2021), 106609. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106609
[24]
Fernando Kamei, Igor Wiese, Gustavo Pinto, Márcio Ribeiro, and Sérgio Soares. 2020. On the Use of Grey Literature: A Survey with the Brazilian Software Engineering Research Community. In Proceedings of the 34th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (Natal, Brazil) (SBES ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 183–192. https://doi.org/10.1145/3422392.3422442
[25]
Barbara Kitchenham and Stuart Charters. 2007. Guidelines for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering. (2007).
[26]
Barbara A. Kitchenham, David Budgen, and Pearl Brereton. 2015. Evidence-Based Software Engineering and Systematic Reviews (Chapman & Hall/CRC Innovations in Software Engineering and Software Development Series). Chapman and Hall/CRC.
[27]
Amy J Ko. 2019. Why we should not measure productivity. In Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering. Springer, 21–26.
[28]
Laurie McLeod and Stephen G MacDonell. 2011. Factors that affect software systems development project outcomes: A survey of research. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 43, 4 (2011), 1–56.
[29]
Silvio Meira. 2021. Desnudando o teletrabalho: transformação digital, o teletrabalho e as perspectivas para o futuro. https://silvio.meira.com/silvio/acervo/desnudando-o-teletrabalho/
[30]
Silvio Meira. 2021. Duas tendências Irreversíveis, Agora. https://silvio.meira.com/silvio/duas-tendencias-irreversiveis-agora/
[31]
Microsoft. 2021. The New Future of Work:Research from Microsoft into the Pandemic’s Impact on Work Practices. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2021/01/NewFutureOfWorkReport.pdf
[32]
Microsoft. 2022. How to Hybrid: The WorkLab Guides. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/hybrid-work-guides
[33]
Microsoft. 2022. Microsoft New Future of Work Report 2022. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2022/04/Microsoft-New-Future-Of-Work-Report-2022.pdf
[34]
Microsoft. 2022. Work Trend Index 2022: Great Expectations: Making Hybrid Work Work. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/great-expectations-making-hybrid-work-work
[35]
Roque Moraes and Maria do Carmo Galiazzi. 2007. Análise textual: discursiva. Editora Unijuí.
[36]
Serge Moscovici. 2007. Representações sociais: investigações em psicologia social, 5ª ed. Vozes, Petrópolis, Brazil.
[37]
Bart Nooteboom, Wim Van Haverbeke, Geert Duysters, Victor Gilsing, and Ad van den Oord. 2007. Optimal cognitive distance and absorptive capacity. Research Policy 36, 7 (2007), 1016–1034. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2007.04.003
[38]
Edson Oliveira, Gislaine Leal, Marco Túlio Valente, Marcelo Morandini, Rafael Prikladnicki, Leandro Pompermaier, Rafael Chanin, Clara Caldeira, Letícia Machado, and Cleidson de Souza. 2020. Surveying the Impacts of COVID-19 on the Perceived Productivity of Brazilian Software Developers. In Proceedings of the 34th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (Natal, Brazil) (SBES ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 586–595. https://doi.org/10.1145/3422392.3422444
[39]
Ilan Oshri, Julia Kotlarsky, and Leslie P Willcocks. 2007. Global software development: Exploring socialization and face-to-face meetings in distributed strategic projects. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems 16, 1 (2007), 25–49.
[40]
Matthew J Page, David Moher, Patrick M Bossuyt, Isabelle Boutron, Tammy C Hoffmann, Cynthia D Mulrow, Larissa Shamseer, Jennifer M Tetzlaff, Elie A Akl, Sue E Brennan, Roger Chou, Julie Glanville, Jeremy M Grimshaw, Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, Manoj M Lalu, Tianjing Li, Elizabeth W Loder, Evan Mayo-Wilson, Steve McDonald, Luke A McGuinness, Lesley A Stewart, James Thomas, Andrea C Tricco, Vivian A Welch, Penny Whiting, and Joanne E McKenzie. 2021. PRISMA 2020 explanation and elaboration: updated guidance and exemplars for reporting systematic reviews. BMJ 372(2021). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n160 arXiv:https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n160.full.pdf
[41]
Jinglin Peng, Weiyuan Wu, Brandon Lockhart, Song Bian, Jing Nathan Yan, Linghao Xu, Zhixuan Chi, Jeffrey M. Rzeszotarski, and Jiannan Wang. 2021. DataPrep.EDA: Task-Centric Exploratory Data Analysis for Statistical Modeling in Python. In Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD ’21), June 20–25, 2021, Virtual Event, China.
[42]
Kai Petersen, Robert Feldt, Shahid Mujtaba, and Michael Mattsson. 2008. Systematic Mapping Studies in Software Engineering. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (Italy) (EASE’08). BCS Learning & Development Ltd., Swindon, GBR, 68–77. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2227115.2227123
[43]
Rafael Prikladnicki. 2003. MuNDDoS : um modelo de referência para desenvolvimento distribuído de software. Master’s thesis. Escola Politécnica, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação.
[44]
Nosheen Qamar and Ali Afzal Malik. 2019. Birds of a Feather Gel Together: Impact of Team Homogeneity on Software Quality and Team Productivity. IEEE Access 7(2019), 96827–96840.
[45]
Everton Quadros., Rafael Prikladnicki., and Regis Lahm.2022. A Grey Literature Review on the Impacts of Covid-19 in Software Development. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS,. INSTICC, SciTePress, 199–206. https://doi.org/10.5220/0011116100003179
[46]
Akond Rahman and Effat Farhana. 2020. An exploratory characterization of bugs in covid-19 software projects. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.00586(2020).
[47]
Paul Ralph, Sebastian Baltes, Gianisa Adisaputri, Richard Torkar, Vladimir Kovalenko, Marcos Kalinowski, Nicole Novielli, Shin Yoo, Xavier Devroey, Xin Tan, 2020. Pandemic programming. Empirical Software Engineering 25, 6 (2020), 4927–4961.
[48]
Paul Ralph, Sebastian Baltes, Gianisa Adisaputri, Richard Torkar, Vladimir Kovalenko, Marcos Kalinowski, Nicole Novielli, Shin Yoo, Xavier Devroey, Xin Tan, Burak Turhan, Rashina Hoda, Hideaki Hata, Gregorio Robles, Amin Milani Fard, and Rana Alkadhi. 2020. Pandemic programming: How COVID-19 affects software developers and how their organizations can help. Empirical software engineering 25 (11 2020), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-020-09875-y
[49]
Paige Rodeghero, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, and Denae Ford. 2021. Please Turn Your Cameras on: Remote Onboarding of Software Developers during a Pandemic. In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (Virtual Event, Spain) (ICSE-SEIP ’21). IEEE Press, 41–50. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-SEIP52600.2021.00013
[50]
Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig. 2009. Artificial Intelligence: a modern approach(3 ed.). Pearson.
[51]
Bernadette Sharp, Florence Sedes, and Wieslaw Lubaszewski. 2017. Cognitive Approach to Natural Language Processing (1st ed.). ISTE Press - Elsevier, London/Oxford, GBR.
[52]
Paulo Silveira, Umme Ayda Mannan, Eduardo Santana Almeida, Nachi Nagappan, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Cuiyun Gao, and Iftekhar Ahmed. 2021. A deep dive into the impact of COVID-19 on software development. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering(2021).
[53]
Robson Simplicio de Sousa and Maria do Carmo Galiazzi. 2017. COMPREENSÕES ACERCA DA HERMENÊUTICA NA ANÁLISE TEXTUAL DISCURSIVA: MARCAS TEÓRICO-METODOLÓGICAS À INVESTIGAÇÃO. Revista Contexto & Educação 31, 100 (abr. 2017), 33–55. https://doi.org/10.21527/2179-1309.2016.100.33-55
[54]
Dell Technologies. 2022. A nova era do trabalho remoto: Tendências da força de trabalho distribuída. https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/pt-br/solutions/business-solutions/industry-market/the-new-remote-work-era-trends-in-the-distributed-workforce.pdf
[55]
Transkritor. 2022. Convert audio to text. https://transkriptor.com/
[56]
Transkritor. 2022. IBM Watson Speech to Text (STT). https://www.ibm.com/br-pt/cloud/watson-speech-to-text
[57]
Transkritor. 2022. Speech to Text. https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text?hl=pt-br
[58]
Impact Economist Google Workspace. 2022. Making hybrid work human. https://impact.economist.com/projects/make-hybrid-human/
[59]
R.K. Yin. 2001. Estudo de caso: planejamento e métodos. Bookman. https://books.google.com.br/books?id=bQXKAAAACAAJ

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Developing a Collaborative Recommendations Guide for Hybrid Software Development: A Focus Group StudyProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3701625.3701644(39-48)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Management of Remote Work in Distributed Software Development: A Systematic Literature ReviewSoftware Engineering Methods Design and Application10.1007/978-3-031-70285-3_12(153-175)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2024

Index Terms

  1. The migration from forced remote work to hybrid work and its impacts on software quality: the case of a multinational company

          Recommendations

          Comments

          Information & Contributors

          Information

          Published In

          cover image ACM Other conferences
          SBQS '22: Proceedings of the XXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality
          November 2022
          352 pages
          ISBN:9781450399999
          DOI:10.1145/3571473
          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]

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          Published: 27 January 2023

          Permissions

          Request permissions for this article.

          Check for updates

          Author Tags

          1. COVID-19
          2. Distributed team management
          3. Hybrid Work
          4. Remote Work
          5. Software Engineering
          6. Software Quality

          Qualifiers

          • Research-article
          • Research
          • Refereed limited

          Conference

          SBQS '22
          SBQS '22: XXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality
          November 7 - 10, 2022
          Curitiba, Brazil

          Acceptance Rates

          Overall Acceptance Rate 35 of 99 submissions, 35%

          Contributors

          Other Metrics

          Bibliometrics & Citations

          Bibliometrics

          Article Metrics

          • Downloads (Last 12 months)76
          • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
          Reflects downloads up to 17 Jan 2025

          Other Metrics

          Citations

          Cited By

          View all
          • (2024)Developing a Collaborative Recommendations Guide for Hybrid Software Development: A Focus Group StudyProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3701625.3701644(39-48)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2024
          • (2024)Management of Remote Work in Distributed Software Development: A Systematic Literature ReviewSoftware Engineering Methods Design and Application10.1007/978-3-031-70285-3_12(153-175)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2024

          View Options

          Login options

          View options

          PDF

          View or Download as a PDF file.

          PDF

          eReader

          View online with eReader.

          eReader

          HTML Format

          View this article in HTML Format.

          HTML Format

          Media

          Figures

          Other

          Tables

          Share

          Share

          Share this Publication link

          Share on social media