  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.
