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Empirical Software Engineering

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01-03-2023

Satisfaction and performance of software developers during enforced work from home in the COVID-19 pandemic

Authors: Daniel Russo, Paul H. P. Hanel, Seraphina Altnickel, Niels van Berkel

Published in: Empirical Software Engineering | Issue 2/2023

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Abstract

Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, the daily lives of software engineers were heavily disrupted as they were abruptly forced to work remotely from home. To better understand and contrast typical working days in this new reality with work in pre-pandemic times, we conducted one exploratory (N = 192) and one confirmatory study (N = 290) with software engineers recruited remotely. Specifically, we build on self-determination theory to evaluate whether and how specific activities are associated with software engineers’ satisfaction and productivity. To explore the subject domain, we first ran a two-wave longitudinal study. We found that the time software engineers spent on specific activities (e.g., coding, bugfixing, helping others) while working from home was similar to pre-pandemic times. Also, the amount of time developers spent on each activity was unrelated to their general well-being, perceived productivity, and other variables such as basic needs. Our confirmatory study found that activity-specific variables (e.g., how much autonomy software engineers had during coding) do predict activity satisfaction and productivity but not by activity-independent variables such as general resilience or a good work-life balance. Interestingly, we found that satisfaction and autonomy were significantly higher when software engineers were helping others and lower when they were bugfixing. Finally, we discuss implications for software engineers, management, and researchers. In particular, active company policies to support developers’ need for autonomy, relatedness, and competence appear particularly effective in a WFH context.

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With r, we mean Pearson’s r, which is a measurement of linear association between two variables; its values ranges between -1 (perfect negative linear association) and + 1 (perfect positive linear association). Values around 0 suggest that there is no linear association between two variables. Statistical power is the probability of detecting an effect of at least a given effect size with a certain probability (here: .80).

The reader should be aware that at the time of the first data collection the understanding among people of COVID-19 and health policies was much different than it is today. For example, we also excluded Denmark who wanted initially to follow Sweden’s herd immunity strategy.

While the three items usually load on the same factor when measured in a non-specific way (Sheldon and Hilpert 2012) – also among software developers see our exploratory study – in the context of our study people still can feel pressured to do an activity while being able to do things their own way. This apparent paradox is likely familiar to many researchers: They are often free to pick their own research projects but might then feel obliged to complete them because of pressure from their colleagues, from editors, or to advance in their career – especially if they have chosen to work on too many projects. Also, given that we have adapted the established balanced measure of psychological needs scale (Sheldon and Hilpert 2012) and that the internal consistencies for the task-independent variables are good (mostly .75 ≤ α ≤ .90), we believe that the issue at hand is the adaptation that unexpectedly did not work rather than the data quality.

Some participants might have construed ‘disagreements or conflicts in the context of specific activities as ‘mild,’ which can happen among colleagues one is usually getting along well or even has befriended (Hood et al. 2017).

Because of the large number of comparisons, we adjusted the α-threshold from .05 to .003 to reduce the risk of false-positive results. This means that we considered only p-values of < .003 as statistically significant. This is a standard procedure for studies that involve many variables to ensure reliable results, e.g., Hanel et al. (2020). Note that changing the α-threshold impacts the test statistic (e.g., t −value), as the test statistic and p-value are perfectly associated with any given sample size (Hays 1994). For example, for an α −threshold of .003 and a sample size of 192 (time 1) or 184 (time 2), the critical t-values are 3.006 and 3.008. In other words, only if the t −value obtained from a t −test is larger than 3.006 (or 3.008), the p-value would be < .003, and we would consider the test result to be statistically significant. Note that a Bonferroni correction would have resulted in an adjusted alpha-level of .05/30 ≈.0017, which is overly conservative and does not consider that some variables are correlated (e.g., between time 1 and 2). Thus, the adjusted significance threshold of .003 seemed appropriate to us, neither overly conservative nor liberal. Also, we are not interpreting p-values that are just above our threshold. Doing this would be equal to stating that there is a trend towards significance, implying that with a larger sample the effect would have become statistically significant. However, this is not the case (Wood et al. 2014)

For the correlations, the Degrees of Freedom are N − 2 = 13 with N = 15 activities.

All graphs were created using the R-packages ggplot2, version 3.3.2 (Wickham 2016), and ggstatsplot, version 0.6.1 (Patil 2021).

Please recall that participants only responded to the top 3 activities out of a total of 12 possible options, as per survey design.

β is standardized effect size, as is the correlation coefficient r.

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Title: Satisfaction and performance of software developers during enforced work from home in the COVID-19 pandemic
Authors: Daniel Russo
Paul H. P. Hanel
Seraphina Altnickel
Niels van Berkel
Publication date: 01-03-2023
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Empirical Software Engineering / Issue 2/2023
Print ISSN: 1382-3256
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7616
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10293-z

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