Software Development During COVID-19 Pandemic
An Analysis of Stack Overflow and GitHub
The new coronavirus became a severe health issue for the world. This situation has motivated studies of different areas to combat this pandemic. In computer science, we point out data visualization projects to follow the disease evolution, machine learning to estimate the pandemic behavior, computer vision processing radiologic images for early detection of the disease, among others. Most of these projects are stored in version control systems, and there are discussions about them in Question & Answer websites. In this work, we conducted a Mining Software Repository to analyze the data of a large number of questions and projects aiming to find trends that could help software development researchers and practitioners to fight the coronavirus. We analyzed 1,190 questions from Stack Overflow and Data Science Q&A and 60,352 GitHub projects. We identified a correlation between the questions and projects throughout the pandemic. The main questions about coronavirus are how-to, related to web scraping and data visualization, using Python, JavaScript, and R. The most recurrent GitHub projects are machine learning projects, using JavaScript, Python, and Java. We realized that many people, including a large number of beginners, are trying to contribute in a someway to tackle the problem. In recent weeks, the number of new projects and questions is decreasing, showing that we are going to stabilize. Finally, we also present a website with our findings, facilitating analysis of everything that has been done, and serving as a support for new solutions that will help in the fight against coronavirus.
