The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 forced Agile Software Development Teams (ASDT) to rapidly transition to remote work and adapt to new business circumstances. The focus of this research was to investigate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on ASDT work and what tools and metrics are used by ASDT. A global survey was performed with 120 answers from different software engineering teams. The results of the research indicate that the work of ASDT wasn't significantly impacted. Most of the ASDT had experience with working in a distributed or remote environment. Therefore, most of the ASDT were able to transitioned to full remote work. Results indicate the Covid-19 pandemic didn't have much impact on Product Backlog and Vision. Moreover, most ASDT didn't change their Definition of Done and release frequency, indicating that the pace and quality of work wasn't disturbed during the Covid-19 pandemic. The few ASDT that changed their work organization did it together with changes to Product Backlog and Vision. Results indicate that the prevalence of distributed teams and remote work among ASDT helped with the transition to fully remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, this article presents gathered data of popularity of different online cooperation tools and metrics used by ASDT.

In modern times, innovation often requires performing complex computations in a short amount of time. However, for many small organisations and freelance innovators, large-scale computations remain beyond reach because of the small accessibility of computation resources and the lack of knowledge required to use them efficiently. The BalticLSC Platform is a software development and computing environment created to address this issue. This paper presents the associated software development process. The platform users can perform advanced computations using ready applications or develop new applications quickly from available components. This can be done using a visual notation called the Computation Application Language (CAL). CAL programs are developed in a dedicated online editor, through selecting and connecting reusable computation modules. If a required module is missing, it can be quickly created by encapsulating code inside a standardised container. The platform's ultimate goal is to relieve the developers from the need to understand the complexity of the distributed parallel computation environment. The platform was implemented in the form of an online software development portal. Validation of the platform consisted in the development of applications and modules by students not experienced in programming. The results of this validation acknowledge the required platform's characteristics.

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Distributed, large-scale computing is typically performed using textual general-purpose programming languages. This requires significant programming skills associated with the parallelisation and distribution of computations. In this paper, we present a visual (graphical) programming language called the Computation Application Language (CAL) to raise abstraction in distributed computing. CAL programs define computation workflows by visualising data flowing between computation units. The goal is to reduce the amount of traditional code needed and thus facilitate development even by non-professional programmers. The language follows the low-code paradigm, i.e. its implementation (the editor and the runtime system) is available online. We formalise the language by defining its syntax using a metamodel and specifying its semantics using a two-step approach. We define a translation of CAL into an intermediate language which is then defined using an operational approach. This formalisation was used to develop a programming and execution environment. The environment orchestrates computations by interpreting the intermediate language and managing the instantiation of computation modules using data tokens. We also present an explanatory case-study example that shows a practical application of the language.

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