  The COVID-19 outbreak has admittedly caused a major disruption worldwide. The
interruptions to production, transportation, and mobility have clearly had a
significant impact on the well-functioning of the global supply and demand
chain. But what happened to the companies developing digital services, such as
software. Were they interrupted as much or at all? And how has the enforced
Working-From-Home mode impacted their ability to continue to deliver software?
We hear that some managers are concerned that their engineers are not working
effectively from home, or even lack the motivation to work in general, that
teams lose touch and that managers do not notice when things go wrong. In this
article, we share our findings from monitoring the situation in an
international software company with engineers located in Sweden, USA, and the
UK. We analyzed different aspects of productivity, such as developer
satisfaction and well-being, activity, communication and collaboration,
efficiency and flow based on the archives of commit data, calendar invites, and
Slack communication, as well as the internal reports of WFH experiences and 18
interviews. We find that company engineers continue committing code and carry
out their daily duties without significant disruptions, while their routines
have gradually adjusted to the new norm with new emerging practices and various
changes to the old ones. In a way, our message is that there is no news, which
is good news. Yet, the experiences gained with the WFH of such scale have
already made significant changes in the software industry's future, work from
anywhere being an example of major importance.
