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Responding to change over following a plan is one of the Agile Manifesto’s values. According to its original perspective, development teams should embrace changes due to a better understanding of the business domain or about the users’ needs. This kind of change is well understood and explored by practitioners and researchers. However, the issue of how development teams embrace changes due to unexpected, severe, and atypical external events (like the ones we are facing during COVID-19) have not been fully discussed. In this paper, we present our experience in managing the expectations and changing the development methods to mitigate the risks of carrying out a research and development project (named Virtual Social Office-VSO) during a pandemic time. To this end, we report on an observational study that explains the main differences between the procedures we expected to follow before the pandemic and the procedures we are following. We also present the percep- tions of both stakeholder and development teams about the impact of COVID-19 on VSO development. Although the development team quickly adapted itself to work from home, we observed some impact on the development plans. In particular, trying to reconcile the trade-offs between completeness and the tight schedule for the first release was a challenge, since we depended on different partners to collect the information that we need to make available in a mobile application (app) that corresponds to one of the VSO project outcomes. According to one stakeholder, the initial effort to design and prototype the VSO app (using the Design Thinking approach) before the start of the pandemic, has been considered essential to mitigate part of the threats that arose due to the COVID-19. We discuss part of these threats in this paper and the actions we have been taking to mitigate them. In addition, according to members of the development team, working remotely presents both challenges (e.g., adapt to a new routine, prepare a comfortable place, isolation feelings), and benefits (e.g., working hours flexibility, less distraction from co-workers)., {"references":["Titan M Alon, Matthias Doepke, Jane Olmstead-Rumsey, and Michele Tertilt. 2020. The impact of COVID-19 on gender equality. Technical Report. National Bureau of Economic Research.","Roy M Anderson, Hans Heesterbeek, Don Klinkenberg, and T Déirdre Hollingsworth. 2020. How will country-based mitigation measures influence the course of the COVID-19 epidemic? The Lancet 395, 10228 (2020), 931–934.","Lingfeng Bao, Tao Li, Xin Xia, Kaiyu Zhu, Hui Li, and Xiaohu Yang. 2020. How does Working from Home Affect Developer Productivity? - A Case Study of Baidu During COVID-19 Pandemic. CoRR abs/2005.13167 (2020), 1–11.","Louis-Philippe Béland, Abel Brodeur, and Taylor Wright. 2020. 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Maintaining complex software systems is a timeconsuming and challenging task. Practitioners must have a general understanding of the system’s decomposition and how the system’s developers have implemented the software features (probably cutting across different modules). Re-engineering practices are imperative to tackle these challenges. Previous research has shown the benefits of using software module clustering (SMC) to aid developers during re-engineering tasks (e.g., revealing the architecture of the systems, identifying how the concerns are spread among the modules of the systems, recommending refactorings, and so on). Nonetheless, although the literature on software module clustering has substantially evolved in the last 20 years, there are just a few tools publicly available. Still, these available tools do not scale to large scenarios, in particular, when optimizing multi-objectives. In this paper we present the Draco Clustering Tool (DCT), a new software module clustering tool. DCT design decisions make multi-objective software clusterization feasible, even for software systems comprising up to 1,000 modules. We report an empirical study that compares DCT with other available multi-objective tool (HD-NSGA-II), and both DCT and HD-NSGA-II with mono-objective tools (BUNCH and HD-LNS). We evidence that DCT solves the scalability issue when clustering medium size projects in a multi-objective mode. In a more extreme case, DCT was able to cluster Druid (an analytics data store) 221 times faster than HD-NSGA-II.

Collaborative development approaches (e.g., pair programming, coding dojo, and hackathons) have gained increasing attention in recent years, mostly because they help to share knowledge during software development activities and might shorten development cycles and increase the quality of software products. Collaborative development approaches bring also the potential benefit to contribute to learning activities. For instance, novices might participate on collaborative development sessions in order to learn new development practices, tools, and techniques used in a software development project. Besides these potential benefits, little is known about the perception of students engaged in collaborative development efforts. Therefore, in this paper we investigate whether or not the engagement of students in collaborative development efforts contributes to the learning process of software development practices and techniques, as well as the perceived benefits and challenges related to collaborative software development activities. To this end, we first performed several of coding dojo sessions during a period of 18 months. These development sessions have been conducted within the context of a real software modernization effort, which aims to modernize two enterprise systems of the Brazilian Army. After that, we carried out a qualitative study where the participants (students, software developers, and software architects) answered a survey, in order to understand the learning benefits of using coding dojo in software development activities. The results so far are encouraging. Coding Dojos allowed professors and software architects to seamless share their experience in software development with the students. According to the answers, the methodology created a better environment for the team, allowing better discussions and ideas to be shared and implemented. This has helped the team members to solve problems easier than by themselves, bringing additional benefits, such as steep the learning curve in programming languages, usage of development tools, understanding the requirements, and code refactoring.