Software Development During COVID-19 Pandemic: an Analysis of Stack Overflow and GitHub

TL;DR

This study analyzes questions from Stack Overflow and projects on GitHub to identify trends in software development related to COVID-19, highlighting common topics and technologies used during the pandemic.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive mining of software repositories to reveal how developers responded to COVID-19 challenges with specific tools and methods.

Findings

Questions focused on web scraping and data visualization using Python, JavaScript, and R.

Most GitHub projects involved machine learning with JavaScript, Python, and Java.

A correlation exists between questions and projects during the pandemic.

Abstract

The new coronavirus became a severe health issue for the world. This situation has motivated studies of different areas to combat this pandemic. In software engineering, we point out data visualization projects to follow the disease evolution, machine learning to estimate the pandemic behavior, and computer vision processing radiologic images. Most of these projects are stored in version control systems, and there are discussions about them in Question & Answer websites. In this work, we conducted a Mining Software Repository on a large number of questions and projects aiming to find trends that could help researchers and practitioners to fight against the coronavirus. We analyzed 1,190 questions from Stack Overflow and Data Science Q\&A and 60,352 GitHub projects. We identified a correlation between the questions and projects throughout the pandemic. The main questions about coronavirus are how-to, related to web scraping and data visualization, using Python, JavaScript, and R. The most recurrent GitHub projects are machine learning projects, using JavaScript, Python, and Java.