Analysis of the working patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic - an industrial case study

This paper reports on an observational analysis of how the current COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent move to home-based online work have affected the development of software. 50 software engineers and developers, mostly in their twenties, all with a university degree and working for 35 different companies, in the Russian IT city of Innopolis, have been surveyed. Their personal perception of the variation of productivity due to the move to online work was recorded, together with the tools that they employed and the processes that were in place before and during the quarantine. This observational nature of the results evidences some reduction in the perceived productivity, especially concentrated in people without previous experience of remote work and without a suitable development environment available at home; moreover, such reduction tends to affect more agile processes rather than non structured processes, and appears to be mitigated by the adoption of suitable communication mechanisms and tools