A Qualitative Study of Developers’ Discussions of Their Problems and Joys During the Early COVID-19 Months
Many software developers started to work from home on a short notice during the early periods of COVID-19. A number of previous papers have studied the wellbeing and productivity of software developers during COVID-19. The studies mainly use surveys based on predefined questionnaires. In this paper, we investigate the problems and joys that software developers experienced during the early months of COVID-19 by analyzing their discussions in online forum devRant, where discussions can be open and not bound by predefined survey questionnaires. The devRant platform is designed for developers to share their joys and frustrations of life. We manually analyze 825 devRant posts between January and April 12, 2020 that developers created to discuss their situation during COVID19. WHO declared COVID-19 as pandemic on March 11, 2020. As such, our data offers us insights in the early months of COVID-19. We manually label each post along two dimensions: the topics of the discussion and the expressed sentiment polarity (positive, negative, neutral). We observed 19 topics that we group into six categories: Workplace & Professional aspects, Personal & Family well-being, Technical Aspects, Lockdown preparedness, Financial concerns, and Societal and Educational concerns. Around 49% of the discussions are negative and 26% are positive. We find evidence of developers’ struggles with lack of documentation to work remotely and with their loneliness while working from home. We find stories of their job loss with little or no savings to fallback to. The analysis of developer discussions in the early months of a pandemic will help various stakeholders (e.g., software companies) make important decision early to alleviate developer problems if such a pandemic or similar emergency situation occurs in near future. Software engineering research can make further efforts to develop automated tools for remote work (e.g., automated documentation). Empirical Software Engineering 27(5): 117 (2022), presented at ICSE 2023 as part of the Journal First program.
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A Qualitative Study of Developers’ Discussions of Their Problems and Joys During the Early COVID-19 Months
- 1. A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF DEVELOPERS’ DISCUSSIONS OF THEIR PROBLEMS AND JOYS DURING THE EARLY COVID-19 MONTHS* GIAS UDDIN, OMAR ALAM, ALEXANDER SEREBRENIK *EMPIRICAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, VOLUME 27, ARTICLE NUMBER: 117 (2022)
- 2. Image by Freepik Lingfeng Bao, Tao Li, Xin Xia, Kaiyu Zhu, Hui Li, Xiaohu Yang. How does Working from Home Affect Developer Productivity? -- A Case Study of Baidu During COVID- 19 Pandemic. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.13167.pdf Paul Ralph, Sebastian Baltes, Gianisa Adisaputri, Richard Torkar, Vladimir Kovalenko, Marcos Kalinowski, Nicole Novielli, Shin Yoo, Xavier Devroey, Xin Tan, Minghui Zhou, Burak Turhan, Rashina Hoda, Hideaki Hata, Gregorio Robles, Amin Milani Fard, Rana Alkadhi: Pandemic programming. Empir. Softw. Eng. 25(6): 4927-4961 (2020) Denae Ford, Margaret-Anne D. Storey, Thomas Zimmermann, Christian Bird, Sonia Jaffe, Chandra Shekhar Maddila, Jenna L. Butler, Brian Houck, Nachiappan Nagappan: A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers Working from Home during the COVID- 19 Pandemic. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 31(2): 27:1-27:37 (2022)
- 6. https://itbrief.co.nz/story/minglr-chat-tool-aims-to-bring-watercooler-talk-back-toz- censored for privacy 825 posts employee/m anager quarantaine telework anger, negative
- 8. My [expletive] employer won’t allow work from home saying unless government enforces it, he can’t allow it and reason he is giving is that wE wOn’t be AbLE tO communicAtE via SkyPE? [Workplace & Professional Aspects / Telework, negative] My fav part of working from home is that I don’t have to inhale the pollution and dust of the city [Education & Societal concerns / Environment, positive]
Editor's Notes
- Welcome, it is a pleasure for me to present our J1 paper about COVID-19.
- But of course, we are not the first authors studying the impact of the COVID pandemic on software engineers. Several great papers have been published, such as the Pandemic Programming of Paul Ralph and co-authors or the Tale of Two Cities by Denae Ford and her co-authors. However, these studies have been based on surveys, i.e., the researchers started with a predefined list of questions. We wanted to observe developers in their natural habitat :) Another group of empirical studies analyzes code repositories to assess the change in productivity in developers in terms of code metrics or software artefacts (Bao et al. 2020; Rahman and Farhana 2020; Wang et al. 2021a). However, focus on code can lead to the non-technical aspects being missed.
- So, ideally we need to a place where we can observe developers in their natural habitat talking about social things, some kind of virtual water cooler where colleagues can chat.
- And luckily, we have found such a water cooler. It is called devRant and has features we know from social media such as Facebook (profile pages, news feed) and Stack Overflow (tags, upvote/downvote, comments). The posts are Rant. Describing an issue/event related to a developer’s life. Story. Describing a development/life incident. Collab. Asking for support to build a project or to solve a technical issue. We analyse all these posts
- Add RQs
- Using tags such as covid19 we have preselected the posts that seemed to be relevant and then manually checked whether they are actually relevant. The first post with explicit mention of COVID-19 in devRant was created on January 29, 2020. This is intuitive, given WHO first officially confirmed 8K COVID-19 cases worldwide on January 30, 2020. There is a notable spike of COVID-19 discussions in devRant starting from the mid of first of week March. WHO declared the COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. While substantial discussions of developers with COVID-19 mentions occurred throughout the month of March 2020, there is a notable drop of the COVID-19 mentions in posts created in April. Indeed, we do not observe much discussion with explicit mentions of COVID-19 in the posts created after April 12, 2020. This finding denotes that developers in devRant started to be accustomed to their new life during pandemic or to become busy with the new setup of their life. Therefore, their expression of any COVID-19 related concerns in devRant might have become more implicit/subtle after April 12, 2020. We, therefore, might need more than tags to find such concerns in those posts (i.e., posts created after April 12, 2020). We leave an analysis of such COVID-19 discussions as our future work.
- But of course we did not merely want to count the posts, we also wanted to understand what developers are talking about and how they express their feelings. This is why the first two authors of this paper have manually labelled the data.
- And those are our results. While there are lots of numbers, some patterns emerge. The topics related to ‘Workplace and Professional Aspects’ were discussed the most (580 times), followed by the categories ‘Personal and Family Wellbeing (362 times)’, and ‘Lockdown Preparedness (305 times)’. Relations are Coworker Relationships (boss etc) Overall, almost half of the posts (49.2%) are negative. The posts with positive sentiment account for 25.7% of all posts.
- Out of the six categories, the negative polarity accounted for more than 50% of the discussions for four categories: Workplace & Professional Aspects (53.6%), Lockdown Preparedness (52.2%), Financial Concerns (65.8%), and Education and societal concerns (53.1%). The most positive (but also the smallest category) is related to environment, in particular to reduced pollution.
- While we will not be able to show examples of all the categories here are a couple of illustrative examples. And one on the cyan background is even related to Australia!
- So to summarise. We have studied the problems and joys experienced by developers in the early days of the pandemic. We have analysed 825 posts and observed that the lion’s share of the posts date from March 2020, around the period that WHO has recognised COVID 19 as a pandemic. Developers talk mostly about workplace & professional activities, personal & family well-being as well as lockdown preparedness. The most negative topics