Navigating Remote Work: Challenges and Adaptations of Agile Teams Amidst Covid-19

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a massive migration from working in the office to working from home (WFH) and the software development teams had to adapt to the new reality. This paper focused on how the agile teams dealt with the challenges of WFH, face-to-face or hybrid during and after the Covid-19 pandemic and how this affected the software development process. To capture the perceptions of the agile teams, we carried out a survey that investigated the following aspects of WFH: work routine, collaboration, communication, productivity, transparency, challenges, and the software development process itself. The survey received 127 valid responses from agile team members and the results revealed that work continued normally during the pandemic, and there was a perception of increased effectiveness in productivity, communication, and interaction. To identify how agile teams adapted to post-pandemic hybrid work, we conducted a focus group to identify whether the changes implemented during the pandemic continued, which phases were most impacted, and which problems and practices were identified. The results showed that the most impacted phases of software development during and after the pandemic were Requirements Elicitation, Software Construction, and Project Management. Daily meeting was one of the most used practices during and after the pandemic. Clickup, Teams, E-mail, Whatsapp, Jira, Slack, and Google Meet tools were used during the pandemic and are still used to support hybrid work.