  While the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on software
professionals and organizations are difficult to predict, it seems likely that
working from home, remote-first teams, distributed teams, and hybrid
(part-remote/part-office) teams will be more common. It is therefore important
to investigate the challenges that software teams and organizations face with
new remote and hybrid work. Consequently, this paper reports a year-long,
participant-observation, constructivist grounded theory study investigating the
impact of working from home on software development. This study resulted in a
theory of software team coordination. Briefly, shifting from in-office to
at-home work fundamentally altered coordination within software teams. While
group cohesion and more effective communication appear protective, coordination
is undermined by distrust, parenting and communication bricolage. Poor
coordination leads to numerous problems including misunderstandings, help
requests, lower job satisfaction among team members, and more ill-defined
tasks. These problems, in turn, reduce overall project success and prompt
professionals to alter their software development processes (in this case, from
Scrum to Kanban). Our findings suggest that software organizations with many
remote employees can improve performance by encouraging greater engagement
within teams and supporting employees with family and childcare
responsibilities.
