Perception of Agile Teams About Home Ofﬁce During the Covid-19

Edna Dias Canedo

1 a

, Angelica Toffano Seidel Calazans

2 b

Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva

1 c

, Isabel Soﬁa Brito

3 d

and Eloisa Toffano Seidel Masson

2 e

University of Bras

ılia (UnB), Department of Computer Science, Bras

ılia, Brazil

University Center of Bras

ılia, UniCEUB, Bras

ılia, DF, Zip-cod 70910-900, Brazil

Polytechnic Institute of Beja, Beja, Portugal

ﬁ

Keywords:

Working from Home, Agile Software Development, Communication, Productivity, Interaction.

Abstract:

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a massive migration from working in the ofﬁce to working from

home (WFH) and the software development teams had to adapt to the new reality. This paper focused on how

the agile teams dealt with the challenges of WFH and how this affected the software development process. To

capture the perceptions of the agile teams, we carried out a survey that investigated the following aspects of

WFH: work routine, collaboration, communication, productivity, transparency, challenges, and the software

development process itself. The survey received 127 valid responses from agile team members and the results

revealed that i) most of the members of agile teams considered the work continued as usual regardless of the

place (ofﬁce or remote); ii) 80% of members of agile teams mentioned an increase in productivity during

WFH; iii) 85% of participants are using Scrum as management strategy; iv) communication between teams

members during the remote working model was perceived as more effective; v) Microsoft Teams and Google

Meets were the most used interactions tools by members of agile teams.

1 INTRODUCTION

In early 2020, with the global COVID-19 pandemic,

software development teams were forced to migrate

to working from home (WFH). On a global scale,

the WFH radically changed the way of producing

software and brought several challenges for project

management and software development teams to

carry on their duties (de Mendonc¸a et al., 2020).

Among the various challenges of working from

home, agile teams faced other challenges such as

communication, collaboration, transparency, and

productivity (Ozkan et al., 2022).

According to the State of Agile Report (digital.ai,

2021), in 2021, 94% of companies surveyed use agile

development methods, and 52% of respondents stated

that agile methods are used in more than half of their

teams. This report also indicates that remote workers

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2159-339X

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2783-4473

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0304-0804

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7556-4367

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0409-058X

have increased yearly, and those numbers increased

dramatically during the pandemic. In addition, only

3% of workers plan to return to face-to-face work, and

96% of workers who started working remotely due to

the pandemic want to continue working remotely.

Ozkan et al. (Ozkan et al., 2022) ratiﬁed that

agile software development has generated interest

due to the growing demands of various types of

organizations. Furthermore, the State of Agile

Report (digital.ai, 2021) added that “in response

to the pandemic, organizations are accelerating

the adoption of new processes, practices, and

technologies to support changes to product and

service delivery”. Considering this context, several

works were carried out to identify the personal and

team impacts, changes in culture and productivity,

and the advantages and disadvantages of WFH

concerning agile teams (Marek et al., 2021; Neumann

et al., 2021; Butt et al., 2021).

In this research, we investigate the perception of

agile teams regarding WFH during the COVID-19

pandemic through a survey that approaches aspects

related to productivity, interaction, transparency,

collaboration, and communication of agile teams

Canedo, E., Calazans, A., Silva, G., Brito, I. and Masson, E.

Perception of Agile Teams About Home Ofﬁce During the Covid-19.

DOI: 10.5220/0011961900003467

In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2023) - Volume 1, pages 68-79

ISBN: 978-989-758-648-4; ISSN: 2184-4992

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

during WFH. These are considered the principles of

agile methods, and investigating how they were used

is essential to understand the agile process during

WFH. In addition, we mapped the challenges and

issues mentioned by agile teams, as well as possible

solutions related to these principles suggested by

them.

Our main ﬁndings reveal that: (i) for most agile

teams, their productivity improved positively during

the WFH; (ii) the interaction between Information

and Communication Technology (ICT) and the

business area improved with the WFH; and (iii)

most agile teams stated that collaboration between

members of agile software development teams has

improved with the adoption of remote work with

the majority of the agile teams pointing to the use

of Microsoft Teams and Google Meets to carry out

discussions on team activities.

2 RELATED WORKS

2.1 Agile Teams

Demir et al. (Demir et al., 2021) deﬁned agile teams

as the ability of a team to remain ﬂexible in facing the

inherent dynamism of a task, continually adjusting

the team’s behavior at the same time that develops

new ones to adapt to unpredictable changes in the

environment. In the context of our study, focusing

on teams working with agile software development,

we adapted this concept to “the ability of a team to

remain ﬂexible in facing the inherent dynamism of

a task, adjusting the team’s behavior continuously

or developing new ones to adapt to unpredictable

changes in the environment, working in the context

of agile software development”.

Agile methodologies provide a competitive and

dynamic approach to development processes in

software engineering. As a result, more and more

software speciﬁcation and development methods

are being replaced by the principles and values

announced in the Agile Manifesto (Beck et al., 2001).

Thus, many methodologies and tools were developed

to support agile software development since it

became mainstream (Kropp et al., 2017)). This

evolution of methods occurs to obtain faster results

and add greater value to organizations, through a

process in which the principles of collaboration,

communication, interaction, and transparency are

essential.

Calefato et al. (Calefato and Ebert, 2019) stated

that “collaboration is strategic to distributed agile

teams, and appropriate tool support is the only way

to do this efﬁciently”. This led us to infer that during

the pandemic, when all development was carried out

through WFH, collaboration and the tools adopted

to implement it became even more critical in this

process. Alzoubi et al. (Alzoubi and Gill, 2021)

stated that agile software development considers

individuals and interaction the highest priority.

According to Demir et al. (Demir et al., 2021) ,

interactions between team members are a dimension

of team agility that is crucial for good performance

in a dynamic task environment. According to

these authors, the relationship between complex

interactive team behaviors and team performance has

been studied, considering different aspects such as

communication, coordination, and trust.

Alzoubi et al. (Alzoubi and Gill, 2021) conducted

a survey with 53 participants and identiﬁed the most

common communication challenges: organizational

factors, team conﬁguration, human factors, and

distance difference. In a previous work, Alzoubi

et al. (Alzoubi et al., 2016), based on a systematic

literature review of 799 papers, had already identiﬁed

communication challenges of geographically

distributed teams that develop software using agile

practices.

Ciancarini et al. (Ciancarini et al., 2021) identiﬁed

communication as a key challenge in agile teams.

The authors conducted interview sessions with 30

IT practitioners from 20 companies and identiﬁed

challenges such as the lack of a standard information

model for requirements-related activities and the

large number of customers leading to too diverse and

controversial requirements. This ﬁnding allows us

to infer that, regardless of the research, most authors

recognize the importance of communication and

interaction between agile teams.

In the context of transparency, Kautz et al. (Kautz

et al., 2016) stated that the transparency of the

process refers to one of the areas that distinguish

agile methods from other development processes.

Agile methods only work as intended if the entire

process is, at all times, transparent, both in the

sense of clarity and openness and visibility for

all people involved, including leadership roles,

developers, and stakeholders. The authors identiﬁed

factors that can interfere with transparency, such

as task status and overview, team collaboration,

estimate credibility, estimation process, and customer

involvement. Given this scenario, the principles

that guide agile models need to be investigated,

as it is essential to understand how agile teams

adapted their work routines during the COVID-19

pandemic. Furthermore, the investigation must cover

all the challenges and opportunities for improvement

Perception of Agile Teams About Home Ofﬁce During the Covid-19

identiﬁed in the context of the WFH.

2.2 Software Development and WFH

The practice of WFH already existed before the

COVID-19 pandemic. According to Ozkan et al.

(Ozkan et al., 2022), even before the pandemic, there

were hybrid teams, where a part of the team members

worked in the organization’s ofﬁce while another

part in remote locations, such as their own home,

universities or co-location ofﬁces. This is particularly

true in software development with distributed teams,

off-shore software, and global or geographically

distributed teams. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic,

many employees from the most varied types of

organizations migrated from the face-to-face model

to WFH. Often, this happened abruptly and forcedly,

without planning, knowledge, or studies to guarantee

a good product delivery or quality of life for team

members. The massive volume of individuals in the

WFH has generated many new research topics to

explore.

Focusing on the physical and mental health

of teams, Butler et al. (Butler and Jaffe, 2021)

conducted a study with 435 Microsoft software

engineers based on the ﬁrst ten weeks of WFH.

The authors identiﬁed that the most signiﬁcant

challenges were the high number of meetings, the

feeling of work overload, and the maintenance of the

mental and physical health of the teams. However,

the authors concluded that the team could mitigate

existing challenges in the WFH as long as they were

known and addressed. The authors also identiﬁed

the need to amplify feelings of gratitude in team

members to improve mood and well-being during the

pandemic period.

Uddin et al. (Uddin et al., 2022) analyzed the

discussions in the devRant online forum during the

ﬁrst months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This forum

enables discussions to be open and not linked to

predeﬁned research questionnaires. The authors

grouped discussions into six categories: i) aspects

related to the workplace; ii) personal and family

well-being; iii) technical aspects; iv) preparation for

conﬁnement; v) ﬁnancial concerns; vi) social and

educational concerns. The authors identiﬁed that

around 49 % of the discussions were negative and 26

% were positive. In addition, on the part of software

developers, they found evidence of problems related

to the lack of documentation for working remotely

and the sense of loneliness during WFH.

Ralph et al. (Ralph et al., 2020b) conducted a

survey with 2,225 respondents from 53 countries and

identiﬁed that the pandemic harmed the well-being

of developers, also noting that productivity and

well-being are closely related. The authors also

identiﬁed that pandemic-related fear and home ofﬁce

ergonomics could affect well-being or productivity.

In addition, they concluded that women, people

with children, and people with disabilities could

be disproportionately affected and that different

types of support are needed according to people’s

proﬁles. Finally, the authors highlighted that the

ergonomics of home ofﬁces must be improved to

improve employee productivity.

In the context of productivity, Bao et al. (Bao

et al., 2020) collected approximately four thousand

records of 139 activities from developers of a

Chinese organization during 138 working days. The

authors identiﬁed that working from home impacts

projects according to their characteristics, such as

programming language, project type, duration, and

size. Similarly, Miller et al. (Miller et al., 2021)

collected 2,265 responses from developers of a

large US organization, and identiﬁed the following

challenges in WFH: reduced skill, interaction,

increased meeting frequency, and decreased social

interaction with outsiders. On the other hand,

the beneﬁts were: increased inclusion of all

team members; increased empathy for other team

members, including increased empathy for remote

teammates prior to COVID-19; increased bonding

in the team; and greater awareness of domestic

challenges.

In Brazil, Jr. et al. (Jr. et al., 2020) investigated

the impact of social isolation on the productivity of

413 software developers. Regarding productivity,

53.27% of developers stated that their productivity

has increased due to less stress, less wasted time

commuting to work, and fewer interruptions. As

disadvantages of WFH, the developers mentioned the

increase in demand because of the dismissal of some

colleagues and fear of losing contracts, among others.

The communication tools most used by developers

were WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, Google Meet,

Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.

Bezerra et al. (Bezerra et al., 2020) carried

out a survey with 58 participants from Brazil and

found that 74% of the participants considered that

their productivity remained good or excellent during

the WFH, and 84.5% felt motivated and had easy

communication with their co-workers. The authors

identiﬁed external disruption, adaptation to the

environment, and emotional issues as the main factors

inﬂuencing productivity. Castro et al. (Castro and

Moreira, 2021) investigated the effects of COVID-19

in the context of existing social inequalities in Brazil

and identiﬁed that remote work had a negative effect

ICEIS 2023 - 25th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

and widened existing inequalities, i.e., WFH favored

the richest, most educated, and formalized workers

and imposed on other workers the need to choose

between employment and income versus the risk of

contagion.

Marek et al. (Marek et al., 2021) investigated the

impact of COVID-19 pandemic on agile software

development teams (ASDT) and what tools and

metrics they used. The authors conducted a survey

with 120 software engineers from several countries

in Europe, Asia and the USA. The ﬁndings indicated

that the work of the ASDTs was not signiﬁcantly

impacted by the pandemic, as most ASDTs had

experience working remotely. Furthermore, the

results indicated that the pandemic did not impact the

product backlog or vision. Additionally, most ASDTs

have not changed their deﬁnition of ready and release

frequency, indicating that the pace and quality of

work have not changed during the pandemic.

Neumann et al. (Neumann et al., 2021) examined

the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on agile

software development in Germany. The authors

carried out multiple case studies in 3 companies.

The results showed that most teams did not decrease

their productivity. Instead, the authors identiﬁed

increased transparency of the process, working time

is used more efﬁciently, and optimized integration

of the product owner. Furthermore, according to the

authors, communication became more objective and

efﬁcient, and there were some changes in the agile

process, such as the daily stand-up meeting (Daily

Scrum), which started to be carried out daily in the

team to increase synchronization.

In Pakistan, in a survey that contradicts most of

the ﬁndings of other surveys, Butt et al. (Butt et al.,

2021) surveyed 250 developers from 10 software

industries to determine the reasons for the failure of

agile methodology during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors identiﬁed a negative impact in 82% of

companies, which reduced the inﬂuence of agile.

According to the authors, there was a big drop in the

productivity of agile teams compared to other teams

that use another development methodology.

Bezerra et al. (Bezerra et al., 2021) investigated

how software development teams in Brazil dealt

with WFH after one year of pandemic. The research

collected data from 67 development team participants

and investigated aspects such as work routine,

collaboration, communication, productivity, ﬁnancial

assistance, and the software development process.

The authors identiﬁed that more than 56% of

the participants had work overload and exceeded

their working hours. However, more than 92%

considered the team collaborative and 82% are

satisﬁed with the communication between team

members. In terms of productivity, 59.7% stated that

they had an improvement in productivity, and 75%

are satisﬁed with their productivity. Santos et al.

(de Souza Santos and Ralph, 2022) also investigated

the impact of WFH on software development. The

authors identiﬁed that WFH fundamentally altered

coordination within software teams. According to

the authors, poor coordination can lead to numerous

problems, including misunderstandings, requests for

help, lower job satisfaction among team members,

and poorly deﬁned tasks.

Mendonc¸a et al. (de Mendonc¸a et al., 2020)

presented an experience report of a case study

and conducted interviews with participants of a

research and development project on the transition

to WFH. The main changes identiﬁed were changes

to the software scope, development procedures,

communication with stakeholders, and project

management. In addition, the authors concluded that

there was no impact on team productivity. However,

the team began working different working hours

than before the pandemic. For example, a series of

contributions were made during weekends, which

allowed us to infer that the team works best during

unusual working hours and without wasting time

commuting.

3 STUDY SETTINGS

In order to deﬁne the research questions and

objectives, we conducted an exploratory focus group

with three ICT practitioners. All participants have

more than 15 years of experience in agile software

development. The objective of the focal group was

to identify which principles related to agile methods

we would research and which aspects were important

during the WFH.

We also used, as a base, previous studies that

investigated productivity and other aspects according

to the perception of software development teams

and worldwide during the WFH (Bezerra et al.,

2020),(Jr. et al., 2020), (Ralph et al., 2020a) and the

guidelines proposed by Moll

eri et al. (Moll

eri et al.,

2020). Furthermore, we analyzed the main features

related to agile models considering previous studies

Agile Manifesto (Beck et al., 2001), Calefato et al.

(Calefato and Ebert, 2019), Alzoubi et al. (Alzoubi

and Gill, 2021), Ciancarini et al. (Ciancarini et al.,

2021) and kautz et al. (Kautz et al., 2016).

In this way, some principles were identiﬁed

(interaction, collaboration, communication) and some

other aspects such as productivity and important tools

Perception of Agile Teams About Home Ofﬁce During the Covid-19

to be investigated in the context of agile models

during the WFH. We investigated which tools were

adopted by agile teams to carry out interaction,

transparency (understanding what needs to be done

and what is being done by teams), communication

between teams, and collaboration. In addition, we

investigated the impediments or problems faced in

adopting the WFH and the challenges, solutions, and

proposals to mitigate or improve the work process.

Therefore, this research aims to investigate the

perception of agile teams about working from home

during the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For this, we conducted a survey study comprising the

following research questions:

RQ.1: What is the perception of agile teams related

to productivity, interaction, collaboration, and

communication during working from home

scenario?

RQ.2: What are the tools used by agile teams during

working from home?

RQ.3: What are the challenges faced by agile teams

during working from home and how were they

solved or mitigated?

3.1 Survey Design

After the focus group and studies, the survey

was then developed iteratively. The survey was

divided into two parts, demographic questions, and

questions related to work routines. The survey

included traditional demographic variables (i.e.,

place of operation, age, level of training, experience,

and functions performed) and questions related

to the respondent’s perception of productivity,

communication, interaction, transparency, and

collaboration. Survey also works with open and

closed questions to improve construct validity. A

construct is a concept that should not be measured

directly. Open and closed constructs were used

regarding the perception of communication, interaction,

transparency, and productivity. On the other hand,

the age, the level of training, and the experience are

all measurable directly, so they were veriﬁed from

the closed questions. Direct measures have inherent

validity, but variables related to constructs should

be more validated to ensure they measure the right

properties (Ralph and Tempero, 2018). In total, the

survey has 33 questions (17 closed questions and 16

open questions). All survey questions are available in

our supplementary material (Canedo et al., 2022).

We validated the survey through a pilot with

4 ICT practitioners working in different software

development teams. The survey questions were

reﬁned according to their feedback, and the answers

were discarded from the data analysis. The survey

initially presented to the participants the description

of the research objectives, aiming to remove

practitioners who did not meet the desired criteria,

that is, practitioners who did not work in agile

teams during the pandemic period. In addition, the

survey contains a question trying to identify how the

practitioner worked during the pandemic. Thus, ICT

practitioners who reported not having WFH due to

COVID-19 were also excluded from the research.

In data analysis, we performed Cronbach Alpha

statistical analyses (Christmann and Aelst, 2006)

to calculate reliability (i.e., the stability of the

responses), correlating the responses given by the

participants. Moreover, we performed the coding of

open questions using Grounded Theory. According

to Martin and Turney (Martin and Turney, 1986),

Grounded Theory is a method’s ability to ﬁt with

different types of researchers and provides a method

that enables a researcher to adduce true meaning and

understanding.

4 SURVEY RESULTS

The survey was conducted anonymously, and no

personally identiﬁable information was collected.

We shared the survey on mailing lists and IT social

networks for recruiting participants. We sent the

online survey to several ICT practitioners in our social

networks and asked them to share it with members

of their development teams. Before participating in

the survey, participants read and accepted the consent

form. The survey was distributed from January

until March 2022. In addition, we invited several IT

practitioners to participate in the survey via email.

The survey was advertised as a general survey on

ICT practitioners’ perception of aspects of the WFH

during the Covid 19 pandemic, considering agile

teams.

We was answered by 132 practitioners who work

in agile teams. The responses of 5 participants

were excluded from the data analysis because

they answered that they did not work from home.

Therefore, we consider the answers of 127 practitioners.

We initially asked questions related to the proﬁle of

the participants. The majority of the respondents

of the survey were from Brazil, but we also had

3 responses from practitioners from Canada and

Portugal. The survey responses can be seen in detail

in our supplementary material (Canedo et al., 2022).

5% of the participants informed that they are

under 21 years old. 16% are between 21 and 25

ICEIS 2023 - 25th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

years old, 11% of participants are between 26 and

30 years old, 13% are between 31 and 35 years old,

16% are between 36 and 40 years old, 21% between

41 and 45 years old, 8% are between 46 and 50 years

old, 6% are between 51 and 55 years old, 3% are

between 56 and 60 years old. Only one participant

reported being over 60 years old (1%), as shown in

Figure 1. Regarding their educational level, 14%

of participants are undergraduate students, 22% are

graduates, 41% are master’s students, 21% have a

master’s degree, 1% are Ph.D. students, and 2% have

a Ph.D, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 1: Age of the respondents.

Figure 2: Educational level of the respondents.

15% of participants reported having between

1 and 3 years of experience in the ICT area, 15%

have between 4 and 6 years, 10% between 7 and 10

years, 15% between 11 and 15 years, 15% between

16 and 20 years old, and 30% of the participants

claimed to have more than 20 years of experience,

as shown in Figure 3. Regarding the area of activity

of the organization in which the participant acts or

acted in a software development project, 6% agile

teams stated that they work in companies of the

state public administration, 30% work in the federal

public administration, 47% work in private software

development companies and 17% of the participants

work in collaboration/research projects.

51% of the participants stated that they work

or worked as a developer in the software projects

they work on, 42% of them work as a project

manager, 32% as a requirements analyst, 28% as

a software engineer, 23% perform data modeling

Figure 3: Working experience in years of the respondents.

activities, 14% work as a software tester, 10% as a

designer (Interaction Designer, UX Designer), and

2% of them work as a specialist in human-computer

interaction, as shown in Figure 4. In relation to

Figure 4: Role in the organization.

maintaining activities during the pandemic, 71%

of the participants reported that their workplace

was closed, but activities fully continued in remote

mode; 28% of them reported that their workplace

was partially closed, and activities fully continued in

the hybrid modality (remote and face-to-face); 7% of

participants reported that their workplace was closed,

but activities partially continued in remote mode.

In relation to agile methodology, Scrum is the

most widely used, 86% of the participants claimed

to use it, 36% use Kanban, 14% use Scrumban, and

8% claimed to use XP. This ﬁnding is similar to other

studies, in which Scrum was also the most widely

used methodology by participants of the Surveys

(digital.ai, 2021), (Canedo et al., 2021). In addition,

we highlight that (Lase et al., 2022) conducted

research to investigate the effectiveness of the use

of Scrum in a distributed software development

environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The

authors identiﬁed a number of success factors in the

use of SCRUM and these factors may be contributing

to the increased adoption of Scrum by Agile Teams.

4.1 RQ.1

According to 82% of participants, this pandemic

imposed an adaptation in the way of working and

WFH positively affected their productivity, 11%

Perception of Agile Teams About Home Ofﬁce During the Covid-19

stated that this adaptation did not affect productivity,

and 6% of them stated that it negatively affected their

productivity.

These ﬁndings conﬁrm the ﬁndings of Oliveira

et al. (Jr. et al., 2020) where 53.27% of developers

said their productivity increased and Bezerra et al.

(Bezerra et al., 2020) that identiﬁed that for 74% of

the research participants, productivity remained good

or excellent during the WFH. Ralph et al. (Ralph

et al., 2020a) identiﬁed strong correlation between

well-being and productivity. Among the reasons

mentioned by the participants for having positively

affected their productivity, we ratify the ﬁndings of

Ralph et al. (Ralph et al., 2020a) regarding well-being

and productivity and we also add aspects related to

displacement, and behavioral aspects (focus, stress,

motivation and information sharing) as variables that

can also impact productivity during WFH.

Aspects Related to Displacement vs Productivity

Increase:

“The trafﬁc and the poor quality of public

transportation impose such a great strain that

only this fact has already given a great advantage

to remote work”.

“The lack of concerns, stress and loss of time

with trafﬁc contributed a lot to the well-being,

and also to perform work activities outside the

conventional schedule (8am to 6pm).”

“Now I arrive at work in the state 100%

productive, before I had to slow down because of

the shift to work and heavy trafﬁc, which greatly

increased the level of stress.”

“[. . . ] the time available for the work was

longer and the breaks made during the activities

were of better quality, thus allowing greater

productivity”.

Aspects Related to Well-being (Noise Free and

Comfortability) vs Productivity Increase:

“...I can work quietly and with less pressure,

delivering more.”

“Being at home, comfortable and establishing

one’s own routine were differentiated factors to

achieve better productivity”.

“The remote working model allowed me to work

in an environment that I feel more comfortable,

allied to this model I also had my work schedule

relaxed. ..”

Aspects Related to Behavior (Focus, Stress,

Motivation And Information Sharing) vs

Productivity Increase:

“WFH allows more focus, avoids distractions and

increases availability for the company. Higher

quality of life. Work with less stress and greater

productivity.”

“Greater focus on work, fewer distraction

problems. Use of remote communication

tools. I believe that has greatly improved my

contributions in software development, ... so the

activities are performed perfectly!”

“The communication between the various areas

of the organization has improved a lot, now it’s

easy to set up a meeting room with multiple teams

sharing and solving the problem in real time.

Before, I had to set up a meeting or make a phone

call, explain the problem. Often it was necessary

to go to the other team’s room to try to solve

some problem. .. Now we can focus on activities

and suffer fewer interruptions during work, which

leaves us more focused on activities.”

Some aspects mentioned that negatively affected

the productivity of agile teams were the higher

demand, having to work after they were supposed

and household tasks. We highlight some of these

transcripts below:

“Lower queue control than previously happened

in face-to-face, we now have more demand and

more individual collection of plaintiffs who fail to

realize that you are already busy.”

“Displacement time was better spent with

professional activities. However, demands and

activities were also carried out during lunch

hours and outside of working hours, as we lost

track of time and worked much more hours.”

“Conciliating domestic chores and caring for

children have greatly affected my productivity.”

“I needed to reinvent myself, and to live with

my concentration problems that I didn’t have or

noticed at work. I learned to organize my hours

and to separate hours of domestic work and hours

of domestic work.”

Considering the principles studied in this research,

the following answers were identiﬁed:

Regarding the interaction between the ICT area

and the business area has improved with the adoption

of remote work, 66% of participants strongly agree

and agree, 28% were neutral, and 6% disagree

(Figure 5 (Q13)). Concerning transparency, 58% of

the participants strongly agree and agree, 34% were

neutral, and 8% disagree (Figure 5 (Q16)). That

transparency (understanding what needs to be done,

what is being done, etc.) improved with the adoption

of WFH.

ICEIS 2023 - 25th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

Regarding the collaboration, 65% of the participants

strongly agree and agree, 26% were neutral, and

9% disagree (Figure 5 (Q19)). That collaboration

among development team members improved

with the adoption of remote work. 59% of the

participants strongly agree and agree. Regarding the

communication 26% were neutral, and 14% disagree

(Figure 5 (Q22)). That communication between the

team became more effective with the adoption of

remote work. 75% of the participants strongly agree

and agree, 19% were neutral. Regarding productivity

6% disagree (Figure 5 (Q25)) that their agile team

became more productive with the adoption of remote

work. 60% of the participants strongly agree and

agree, 30% were neutral, and 10% disagree (Figure

5 (Q28)) that impediments or problems were solved

more quickly with the adoption of WFH.

The survey also allowed us to calculate the

reliability of the responses, that is, the stability

of the practitioners’ responses, correlating the

responses given by the participants with respect

to the previously mentioned constructs (team

productivity, interaction, transparency, collaboration,

and communication). The answers provided

information on the reliability of a scale for Cronbach’s

Alpha (Christmann and Aelst, 2006). It is understood

that the internal consistency of a questionnaire is

greater the closer to 1 is the statistical value. That

is, coefﬁcients close to 0 are undesirable since they

indicate a low association. The positive values in

the correlation matrix indicate that all the items

analyzed (productivity, interaction, transparency,

collaboration and communication) are correlated.

The general Cronbach’s Alpha was 0.8499, which

is higher than the common benchmark of 0.7 (Table

1). The dispersion matrix presented in Table 1 also

shows that most items have a linear and positive

relationship, as shown in Table 1.

Figure 5: Level of agreement regarding the positive impact

of WFH on interactions, transparency, collaboration,

communication, productivity and problem solving,

respectively.

Table 1: Correlation matrix (Pearson’s Correlation Test).

Productivity Interaction Transparency Collaboration

Interaction 0.395

Transparency 0.487 0.626

Collaboration 0.566 0.479 0.558

Communication 0.528 0.442 0.532 0.705

Regarding the open questions, we performed their

coding using Grounded Theory (de Souza Santos

and Ralph, 2022). We coded the open-ended survey

responses iteratively and inductively, where two of

the paper authors tabulated all responses and then

compared all ﬁndings in agreement sessions with all

authors to reﬁne them. To come to an agreement, this

process was repeated three times until all responses

were encoded and tabulated on a ﬁnal set of ﬁndings

and the representative codes for it. In total, we

found 4 categories: Information Sharing, Behavioral

Change, Tools, and Productivity.

In the category Information Sharing, we obtained

communication, transparency, and interaction

subcategories. The Behavioral Change category

we classify in the subcategories communication,

transparency, interaction, and collaboration. The

Tools category was classiﬁed into the subcategories

communication, transparency, interaction, and

collaboration. Finally, the Productivity category has

no subcategories. The complete view of our coding

result can be seen in our supplementary material

(Canedo et al., 2022).

Based on this analysis, it is possible to infer

that most of the responses of the behavioral

change demonstrate that the productivity and the

characteristics of communication, transparency,

interaction, and collaboration have improved. We

can cite the following: learn to communicate faster;

virtual meetings are punctual and better coordinated;

dynamic and fast interactions; Product Owners

began to communicate daily with agile staff; IT and

business area learned to work together; stakeholders

became more available and accessible and began to

collaborate with the team. Regarding productivity,

in addition to the perception of productivity having

improved during the WFH, both individually and

within the agile teams, some of the answers most

mentioned by the respondents were: concentration at

work, not being distracted, and manager of my own

time.

This result allows us to infer another change

in individual behavior inﬂuencing productivity.

Moreover, the information during WFH was

more shared due to the facilities offered by the

communication tools used by the Agile Teams, as

well as the increased frequency of Meetings.

Perception of Agile Teams About Home Ofﬁce During the Covid-19

4.2 RQ.2

Concerning the tools used, it is possible to infer that

they were probably an impacting factor in the increase

of productivity, or even in the signiﬁcant weighting

of communication, transparency, interaction, and

collaboration characteristics. The easiness of

scheduling meetings, prevention of information loss,

and monitoring tools were the most mentioned by

agile teams. Below are some comments obtained in

the survey regarding the impact of the tools adopted

on productivity:

“At ﬁrst it was a difﬁcult process of adaptation.

With the help of tools like Microsoft Teams,

Slack, Bitbucket and Jira, we could maintain good

productivity.”

“...The use of video calling tools brought teams

closer together.

Table 2 presents the tools most used by participants

to interact with ICT and the business area and to

carry out the activities with transparency. Microsoft

Teams was the tool most used by agile teams to

perform interactions between the ICT and business

areas (mentioned by 43 participants) and to perform

the activities with transparency (mentioned by 16

participants).

Table 2: Tools used by agile teams.

ICT and Business Interaction Transparency

Tools Cited Tools Cited

Microsoft Teams 43 Microsoft Teams 16

Google Meets 14 Trello 8

Trello 7

Google Meets 6

Jira 5 Jira 5

Email 3 Kanban 4

Kanban 3 WhatsApp 3

Slack 3 Discord 3

WhatsApp 3 Redmine 2

Zoom 2 Slack 2

Discord 2 Git 2

Redmine 2 IdeaBoardz 1

Swagger 1 Skype 1

IdeaBoardz 1 Swagger 1

Zoom 1

4.3 RQ.3

In the survey, we have asked Agile Teams whether

their perception of working with age teams remotely

was more challenging than working face-to-

face and whether they encountered the same

difﬁculties/challenges or others appeared. Most

Agile Teams stated that the beginning of the WFH

was more challenging, with respect to home and

work routines, but over time they were adapting to

the WFH. Some practitioners mentioned difﬁculties

or challenges, related to behavioral aspects, such as

lack of eye contact with colleagues, lack of body

language perception, lack of human contact, lack of

interaction between team members, and lack of team

motivation.

In addition, the Agile Teams recognize that

the level of abstraction during remote work is

lower than the traditional “in-company” model. On

the other hand, teams presented more focus and

discipline. Another challenge mentioned by Agile

Teams was the interaction between tools and efﬁcient

communication. Some practitioners recognize that

some people need personal coordination. Staff

turnover and remotely integrating new professionals

into the team were also mentioned as a challenge

during the WFH. Some challenges mentioned by

Agile Teams were:

Behavioral Aspects:

“WFH’s challenges are different, not all people

open the cameras, and we lose visual contact,

perception of body language, the company has

not bought other tools that help in the sharing of

ideas in a playful way. Some teams had employees

without access to corporate Teams, not being able

to be in the same chat and so we lost this feeling

of being sitting next to each other.”

“The main difﬁculty was dealing with members

who did not show the minimum of discipline with

remote work.”

“The main difﬁculties are dealing with

professionals who use the freedom of the

home ofﬁce for procrastination and/or solving

particular problems (go out to shop, go to the

gym, travel, etc, even at ofﬁce hours). There was

also a problem in dealing with professionals who

were very focused on work and did not look at

messaging services, becoming inaccessible for

several hours a day.”

“I believe it was more challenging due

to the difﬁculties in maintaining efﬁcient

communication. Although productivity has

improved, communication has worsened, as

people are no closer. Each remains focused on

their work without interacting with other team

members.”

“Remotely it was more challenging with agile

teams, because communication is essential, and

we had a lot of difﬁculty in communication

between teams and transparency of activities and

projects between squads.”

Regarding the alternatives to mitigate the

challenges and difﬁculties encountered during

ICEIS 2023 - 25th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

the WFH, some practitioners suggested some

solutions: larger interaction between the platforms

and tools used; more frequent meetings and

discussions; periodic reports; creation of routines;

more accessible working protocols; greater amount

of training; coaching, with closer monitoring of

workers; compliance and commitment with meeting

schedules; respect working hours. We quote below

some of the solutions mentioned by respondents:

“ More frequent meetings and conversations, in

addition to periodic reports and strict application

of minimum service levels control indexes.”

“Offer practitioners frequent training, coaching,

creation of backlog evolution indicators, training

and mentoring with the team.”

“Carry out a closer follow-up with all team

members, stimulating communication and debates

between team members.”

Survey participants mentioned other important

considerations that were not addressed in the survey

questions:

“Regarding the health of members of the age

teams, there were fewer departures during the

pandemic.”

“Issues such as the costs of working from home

and the cost of expenses, even partial, still need

to be better addressed by companies. Also, the

evaluation of results, performance and dedication

of team members.”

“The diversity of proﬁles and some aspects of

remote work require attention, especially aspects

related to mental health.”

“The lack of empathy in understanding that

people who are on the other side due to the

pandemic may be experiencing motivation, family,

or health problems, is a factor that needs

to be discussed and mentioned by individuals.

Understanding that remote work is not Home

Ofﬁce is an important point. Bringing light to

these and other issues have brought gain to our

Agile team.”

“The turnover in the ICT area was very high

with the advent of the pandemic, which greatly

hampered the work of agile teams that needed to

devote more hours to meet their demands.”

5 THREATS TO VALIDITY

The collection of survey data allows us to minimize

the threats to internal validity, considering that

the participants were selected randomly and the

researcher did not interact with the participants,

so there was no inﬂuence from him on the results.

Moreover, the survey has a description and questions

to identify the practitioners who meet the desired

criteria, i. e., working in agile teams during the

pandemic period and having WFH due to COVID-19.

Thus, ICT practitioners who did not meet the desired

criteria were excluded from the research. Finally, to

ensure the conclusion’s validity, we consider that the

sample size allows us to draw interesting conclusions.

Within the scope of external validity, we consider

that the instrument used to collect data from the

survey provided an ideal means and allowed us to

collect a representative sample even though most

agile teams are from Brazil. In this context, further

studies will be conducted, particularly in other

countries, to generalize the results. Finally, the

realization of the Focus group and a pilot survey with

4 ICT practitioners working in different software

development teams allowed us to validate the

questions asked in the survey.

6 CONCLUSIONS

This research aimed to identify the perception of

Agile Teams regarding productivity, interaction,

collaboration, and communication during Working

from Home (WFH). In addition, we investigated

which tools were used by Agile Teams, which

challenges were faced during WFH and how they

were solved or mitigated. We identiﬁed that, for

most participants, an adaptation in the way of

working was necessary and that productivity was

positively affected. The interaction between the

Information and Communication Technology ICT

and business areas has improved. Transparency

(understanding what needs to be done and what

is being done), collaboration, and communication

have also improved. According to the participants,

the obstacles or problems were solved with greater

agility.

We identiﬁed several other tools also used in

smaller numbers during COVID-19. Monitoring

tools were also widely cited, allowing greater control

of who is doing what. In addition, we identiﬁed that

most respondents work with Scrum. Concerning

the challenges and actions undertaken to solve

or mitigate them, we have identiﬁed a series of

behavioral changes that have enforced the positive

perception of the participants regarding productivity,

collaboration, transparency, communication, and

interaction. These are: the increasing frequency

Perception of Agile Teams About Home Ofﬁce During the Covid-19

of meetings; the ease of scheduling meetings and

the better coordination; dynamism and speed of

virtual meetings. In addition, there was an increase

in the collaboration and communication of the team

members and the perception of the need to integrate

the work.

In future works, we suggest continuing the

research in other contexts, aiming to ratify these

ﬁndings. For example, we suggest monitoring the

agile teams returning the face-to-face activities to

verify whether these changes were only temporary

or permanent and whether they would modify the

way they work. Another interesting research would

be to verify if the positive ﬁndings of this paper are

related to the age group of the participants since 48%

of the participants are under 35 years old, and some

works have already identiﬁed that the group’s age can

inﬂuence the results of WFH.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study was ﬁnanced in part by the Coordenac¸

de Aperfeic¸oamento de Pessoal de N

ıvel Superior –

Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.

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