Abstract
Context
The COVID-19 pandemic posed challenges to people from all professions and walks of life, and software professionals were no exceptions.
Objective
In this study, we investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on software professionals and their work practices with a focus on New Zealand. We specifically examined how software professionals and companies responded to different challenges, which is missing in the current literature.
Method
We conducted an exploratory study to learn how COVID-19 challenged software professionals and their responses to these challenges. We interviewed eighteen software professionals working in different New Zealand software companies providing them an opportunity to reflect on how they and their companies faced and dealt with the pandemic. We performed thematic analysis to identify various themes from our data set.
Results
We found that software professionals faced various personal, financial, and work setup-related challenges. COVID-19 impacted the productivity and workload of software professionals. It also affected the software development practices for teams, specifically for colocated teams. We observed that software professionals tried to workaround some challenges by themselves. We found that software professionals demonstrated empathy to their coworkers and supported each other during tough times. We also found that software companies facilitated software professionals in several various ways. We present a framework of the perceived responses of the software professionals, teams, and companies to various challenges they faced during the pandemic.
Conclusion
Our results reveal that software professionals with specific demographics, e.g., working and single parents, contractual employees, and employees working for smaller companies, were most impacted by the COVID-19 restrictions. Our findings indicate that, through the COVID-19 pandemic, software companies trusted and empowered their employees and equipped them with the right tools and equipment and a healthy environment.
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Data Availability
The authors cannot share the data set to maintain the anonymity of the study participants and fulfill Ethics requirements.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all participants who contributed to this study. We would also like to thank our anonymous reviewers for their feedback that helped to improve the quality of this work.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. This research was partially funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). This study was conducted under approval from the Human Participants Ethics Committee at the University of Auckland.
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Communicated by: Nachiappan Nagappan
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Masood, Z., Blincoe, K. & Damian, D. What have we learned? A conceptual framework on New Zealand software professionals and companies’ response to COVID-19. Empir Software Eng 28, 109 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10309-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10309-8