Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic shook the world to its core and provoked an overnight exodus of software developers who normally worked in an office setting to working from home. In this talk, I will present the results of several studies at Microsoft on how software developers and their teams have been affected by this change. I will discuss benefits and challenges of remote work and the impact of productivity during the pandemic. I will conclude with research opportunities and implications for the new hybrid work in software engineering as many developers are returning to work in offices.

About Thomas Zimmermann:

Thomas Zimmermann is a Sr. Principal Researcher in the Productivity and Intelligence (P+I) and Software Analysis and Intelligence (SAINTes) groups at Microsoft Research. He received his PhD in 2008 from Saarland University in Germany. From 2007 to 2008 he was a full-time Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Calgary. His professional interests are software engineering, data science, and recommender systems. He is best known for his research on systematic mining of version archives and bug databases to conduct empirical studies and to build tools to support developers and managers. At Microsoft, he uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate and overcome software engineering challenges. His current work is on productivity of software developers and data scientists at Microsoft. His work received several awards, including seven Ten Year Most Influential Paper awards as well as five ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards. He received the IEEE CS TCSE Distinguished Service Award for his service to the software engineering community and the IEEE CS TCSE New Direction Award for co-founding the mining software repositories field. He was Program Co-chair for MSR’10, MSR’11, ICSME’17 and ESEC/FSE’20 and General Chair for MSR’13, SIGSOFT FSE’16 and ASE’19. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE and currently serves as Chair of ACM SIGSOFT, the Special Interest Group on Software Engineering. For more information, visit his homepage http://thomas-zimmermann.com or follow him on Twitter @tomzimmermann.