The mass shift to working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the way many software development teams collaborate and communicate. To investigate how team culture and team productivity may also have been affected, we conducted two surveys at a large software company. The first, an exploratory survey during the early months of the pandemic with 2,265 developer responses, revealed that many developers faced challenges reaching milestones and that their team productivity had changed. We also found through qualitative analysis that important team culture factors such as communication and social connection had been affected. For example, the simple phrase "How was your weekend?" had become a subtle way to show peer support. In our second survey, we conducted a quantitative analysis of the team cultural factors that emerged from our first survey to understand the prevalence of the reported changes. From 608 developer responses, we found that 74% of these respondents missed social interactions with colleagues and 51% reported a decrease in their communication ease with colleagues. We used data from the second survey to build a regression model to identify important team culture factors for modeling team productivity. We found that the ability to brainstorm with colleagues, difficulty communicating with colleagues, and satisfaction with interactions from social activities are important factors that are associated with how developers report their software development team's productivity. Our findings inform how managers and leaders in large software companies can support sustained team productivity during times of crisis and beyond.
翻译:在COVID-19大流行期间,大规模转向在家工作,这从根本上改变了许多软件开发团队的合作和交流方式。为了调查团队文化和团队生产率如何受到影响,我们在一家大型软件公司进行了两项调查。第一项调查是该流行病最初几个月的2 265个开发商答复的探索性调查,显示许多开发商面临达到里程碑阶段的挑战,他们的团队生产率也发生了变化。我们还通过定性分析发现,通信和社会联系等重要团队文化因素已经受到影响。例如,简单的短语“你的周末如何?”已成为显示同行支持的微妙方式。在第二次调查中,我们对第一次调查中出现的团队文化因素进行了定量分析,以了解所报告的变化的普遍性。在608个开发商答复中,我们发现74%的受访者错过了与同事的社会互动,51%的受访者报告说,他们与同事的沟通便利程度有所下降。我们利用第二次调查的数据来建立回归模型,以确定团队生产力等重要文化因素。我们发现,与同事进行脑风暴的能力,难以与同事沟通,以及社会活动对互动的满意度,是我们第一次调查中出现的文化因素,以了解所报告的变化的普遍程度。从60年,我们企业的生产率报告团队是如何联系到我们生产率是如何与开发团队是如何联系。