Software Engineers Response to Public Crisis: Lessons Learnt from Spontaneously Building an Informative COVID-19 Dashboard

TL;DR

This paper describes how software engineers rapidly built an informative COVID-19 dashboard in Australia, sharing lessons learned to improve future crisis response tools and strategies.

Contribution

It presents first-hand observations and nine lessons from spontaneously developing a COVID-19 information dashboard during the pandemic.

Findings

Served over 830,000 users with 14 million page views.

Provided reliable, semi-automatically checked COVID-19 information.

Shared nine lessons for future crisis-related software development.

Abstract

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak quickly spread around the world, resulting in over 240 million infections and 4 million deaths by Oct 2021. While the virus is spreading from person to person silently, fear has also been spreading around the globe. The COVID-19 information from the Australian Government is convincing but not timely or detailed, and there is much information on social networks with both facts and rumors. As software engineers, we have spontaneously and rapidly constructed a COVID-19 information dashboard aggregating reliable information semi-automatically checked from different sources for providing one-stop information sharing site about the latest status in Australia. Inspired by the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Map, our dashboard contains the case statistics, case distribution, government policy, latest news, with interactive visualization. In this paper, we present a participant's in-person observations in which the authors acted as founders of https://covid-19-au.com/ serving more than 830K users with 14M page views since March 2020. According to our first-hand experience, we summarize 9 lessons for developers, researchers and instructors. These lessons may inspire the development, research and teaching in software engineer aspects for coping with similar public crises in the future.