Impact in software engineering activities after one year of COVID-19 restrictions for startups and established companies

Hosna Hooshyar, Eduardo Guerra*, Jorge Melegati, Dron Khanna, Abdullah Aldaeej, Gerardo Matturro, Luciana Zaina, Des Greer, Usman Rafiq, Rafael Chanin, Xiaofeng Wang, Juan Garbajosa, Pekka Abrahamsson, Foutse Khomh, Anh Nguyen-Duc

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)
92 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic required software development teams to adapt, being forced to work remotely and adjust the software engineering activities accordingly. In studies that evaluated these effects, few assess the impact on software engineering activities from a broader perspective after one year, when teams had time to adjust to the changes, nor compare software startups and established companies. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on software development activities after one year of the pandemic restrictions, comparing the results between startups and established companies. Our approach was to design a cross-sectional survey and distribute it online among software development companies worldwide. The participants were asked about their perception of COVID-19’s impact on different software engineering activities: requirements engineering, software architecture, UX design, software implementation, and software quality assurance. The survey received 170 valid answers from 29 countries, and for all the software engineering activities, we found that most respondents did not observe a significant impact. The results also showed that software startups and established companies were affected differently since, in some activities, we found a negative impact in the former and a positive impact in the latter. Regarding the time spent on each software engineering activity, most of the answers reported no change, but on those that did the result points to an increase in time. We cannot find any relation between the change in time of effort and the reported positive or negative impact.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)55178-55203
Number of pages25
JournalIEEE Access
Volume11
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 25 May 2023

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