While many organizations have shifted to working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, how the remote workforce and the remote teams are influenced by and would respond to this and future shocks remain largely unknown. Software developers have relied on remote collaborations long before the pandemic, working in virtual teams (GitHub repositories). The dynamics of these repositories through the pandemic provide a unique opportunity to understand how remote teams react under shock. This work presents a systematic analysis. We measure the overall effect of the early pandemic on public GitHub repositories by comparing their sizes and productivity with the counterfactual outcomes forecasted as if there were no pandemic. We find that the productivity level and the number of active members of these teams vary significantly during different periods of the pandemic. We then conduct a finer-grained investigation and study the heterogeneous effects of the shock on individual teams. We find that the resilience of a team is highly correlated to certain properties of the team before the pandemic. Through a bootstrapped regression analysis, we reveal which types of teams are robust or fragile to the shock.

翻译：尽管许多组织在COVID-19疫情期间转向远程办公，但远程劳动力和远程团队如何受此及未来冲击影响并做出应对，仍 largely 未知。早在疫情爆发前，软件开发者就已依托远程协作，在虚拟团队（GitHub仓库）中开展工作。这些仓库在疫情期间的动态变化为理解远程团队如何应对冲击提供了独特机遇。本研究提出系统性分析方案：通过将公共GitHub仓库的规模与生产力与假设无疫情情况下的反事实预测结果进行对比，衡量疫情早期的整体影响。研究发现，这些团队的生产力水平与活跃成员数量在疫情不同阶段存在显著波动。随后我们开展更精细的粒度研究，分析冲击对个体团队的异质性影响，发现团队韧性与其疫情前的特定属性高度相关。通过自举回归分析，我们揭示了哪些类型的团队在冲击中表现出稳健性或脆弱性。