Agile Working During COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Agile working and its values have been applied by companies for several years. The values and principles of agile working aim primarily at teams that work in close proximity, for example in open-plan offices, where the teams usually work together and communicate in daily personal meetings. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies reduced office hours and sent their employees to home offices, in order to reduce the risk of infections. Accordingly, the way of working changes significantly, as despite all the technical advances, working from home is different from working in open-plan offices. Direct face-to-face communication has been replaced by online meetings using video conferencing, chats and cloud-based collaboration. Many employees were used to online-based tools for remote collaboration, but others were reluctant to them in the past. Due to the sudden change in the work environment a need to use these tools in order to participate in business at all arose also for the employees who would not have used them under normal conditions. In this article, we present the results of a recent study, in which the impact of the pandemic on agile working is examined. Based on these results, we derive a scenario of the future of agile working in a post COVID-19 world. The study comprises an online survey in Germany. More than 170 people working in different job positions and from different branches and companies participated. The study reveals that the pandemic has significantly changed the way of working. However, people value the digital tools and find ways for effective and efficient collaboration in distant work environments.

Impacts of COVID-19 Pandemic for Software Development in Nordic Companies – Agility Helps to Respond

“…Considering agility development (Q0, Sect. 4.1), a German management survey discovered that perceived agility of projects during the early stages of the pandemic remained high and, on average, slightly increased [5]. This concurs with our findings.…”

“…But since remote working does not allow agile practices to be performed in the previous way, practices and tools needed to be replaced. This significantly changed the agile way of working [5]. reported those results in our prior publications [8].…”

“…Overall, the pandemic has affected different industries and companies in different countries in various ways, even within the core ICT industry, and different companies have devised various ways to respond and adapt to the impacts (e.g., [4,5]). The pandemic year 2020 affected significantly and suddenly the work-life in Finland and Sweden too, due to extensive telecommuting recommendations.…”

The Impact of Covid 19 on Agile Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In four studies, single, multiple, or longitude case studies with a qualitative approach were used. Da Camara et [38] Qualitative (multiple) case study [39,40,41,42] Quantitative survey [43,44,45,46,47] Table 3. Overview of the used research designs literature review.…”

“…Overview of the used research designs literature review. Seven primary studies were published in conference proceedings ( [38,39,40,42,43,44], the remaining six were published in journals [36,37,41,45,46,47].…”