Challenges working from home and its impact on Code reviews - Multiple Case Study

Sammanfattning: Background: COVID-19 is a dangerous contagious infection which was declared as a global pandemic by World Health Organisation (WHO) in March 2020. It was rapidly spreading worldwide, forcing the world to move into isolation and the software developing companies to change their work settings into remote working. Quality of the software is a significant attribute that determines the success of a project. Code reviews are an essential software development practice and are the first step towards improving the quality of the software. Objectives: The main objective of this research study is to list the challenges that the developers are facing while working from home and investigate the impact of challenges on code review practices. Methods: A multiple case study has been conducted in 5 organizations to understand and analyze the effect of transition on the code review process. We achieved this by conducting semi-structured interviews and participant observation with developers involved in code review practices of each organization considered for the study and qualitatively analyzed the gathered data using thematic analysis. Results: The results indicated challenges concerning team collaboration, infrastructure, productivity and burnout in the early stages of the pandemic. However, later, organizations’ mitigating strategies have helped them cope with the situation, and no significant impact due to working from home were observed on the code review process. Conclusions: Our findings highlight that there is no considerable impact of the challenges factored in due to working from home on the code review process. The major reasons behind that was the modernization of the tools used for code reviews and timely implementation of mitigation strategies by organizations. Based on the mitigation strategies taken by the organisations we formulated guidelines, which can be taken into consideration by the organisations still suffering with the transition to work from home.