How does Working from Home Affect Developer Productivity? -- A Case Study of Baidu During COVID-19 Pandemic

TL;DR

This study quantitatively analyzes how working from home during COVID-19 affected developer productivity at Baidu, revealing both positive and negative impacts influenced by project characteristics and individual differences.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale quantitative analysis of WFH effects on developer productivity during COVID-19, considering project and individual factors.

Findings

WFH impacts vary across different productivity metrics.

Large projects experience negative productivity impacts when working from home.

Developer productivity differences are influenced by project characteristics and individual factors.

Abstract

Nowadays, working from home (WFH) has become a popular work arrangement due to its many potential benefits for both companies and employees (e.g., increasing job satisfaction and retention of employees). Many previous studies have investigated the impact of working from home on the productivity of employees. However, most of these studies usually use a qualitative analysis method such as survey and interview, and the studied participants do not work from home for a long continuing time. Due to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a large number of companies asked their employees to work from home, which provides us an opportunity to investigate whether working from home affects their productivity. In this study, to investigate the difference of developer productivity between working from home and working onsite, we conduct a quantitative analysis based on a dataset of developers' daily activities from Baidu Inc, one of the largest IT companies in China. In total, we collected approximately four thousand records of 139 developers' activities of 138 working days. Out of these records, 1,103 records are submitted when developers work from home due to COVID-19 pandemic. We find that WFH has both positive and negative impacts on developer productivity in terms of different metrics, e.g., the number of builds/commits/code reviews. We also notice that working from home has different impacts on projects with different characteristics including programming language, project type/age/size. For example, working from home has a negative impact on developer productivity for large projects. Additionally, we find that productivity varies for different developers. Based on these findings, we get some feedbacks from developers of Baidu and understand some reasons why WFH has different impacts on developer productivity.