Sebastian Baltes

Software Engineering
Empirical Research
Interdisciplinarity


Thank you for your interest in our study on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on software development. You have to agree to the following terms before you can participate in the study, which has been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of Adelaide (approval number H-2020-XXX). You can download the ethics approval here, the questionnaire is available here here.

Paul Ralph
Dalhousie University, Canada

Sebastian Baltes
The University of Adelaide, Australia

General Information

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many knowledge workers have been asked or told to work from home. While there is a large body of research on working from home and a large body of research on distributed software development, there is no research on working from home during an unprecedented pandemic where widespread lockdowns have closed schools, daycares, fitness facilities, entertainment facilities, and other businesses. The purpose of this study is to investigate:

  1. how working from home under these conditions affects software professionals’ wellbeing and productivity and

  2. what software companies are and could be doing to help.

Participation in this survey is completely voluntary. You are free to withdraw your participation at any point before submission by closing the page. Since the first part of this study is completly anonymous (providng you email address is optional, see below), it is not possible to delete your data after submission. We will handle all collected data confidentially and will never publish information that could identify you as an individual or your organisation. Answering the questions takes about 20 minutes. Most questions are closed-ended and use established scales. If you are interested to receive the results after publication, you can provide your email address at the end of the survey.

Benefit

Your participation in this survey won’t have an immediate benefit for you, but it helps us to understanding the effects of forcing software professionals to work from home during the COVID-19 crisis. As soon as possible, we want to publish a report to support software professionals and their organisation navigating the COVID-19 crisis.

Contact

If you have questions, want to provide feedback, or voice concerns about this study, please contact Paul Ralph or Sebastian Baltes. If you wish to speak with an independent person regarding concerns or a complaint, the University of Adelaide’s policy on research involving human participants, or your rights as a participant, you may also contact the University of Adelaide’s Human Research Ethics Committee’s Secretariat on phone +61 8 8313 6028 or by email.