This article is based on reporting originally published on devops.com in May 2020, drawing on statements from GitHub, CloudBees, JFrog, Thundra, and GitLab.
Development Activity Held Steady—But Hours Increased
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overall volume of software development activity remained relatively constant, even as developers shifted almost entirely to working from home. A GitHub report from the period showed a brief, regional dip in activity as the pandemic spread, followed by a quick recovery on the public GitHub repository.
More notably, the time each developer spent on the platform increased. Kelly Stirman, Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing at GitHub, attributed this in part to developers no longer commuting and to extended working days that blended professional and personal tasks. His conclusion was straightforward: “More time to code increases productivity.”
Whether that extra screen time translates directly into higher output is harder to measure. Home environments introduce distractions, caregiving responsibilities, and irregular schedules. The data reflects time on platform, not necessarily lines of production-ready code shipped.
Digital Transformation Projects Became Business Continuity Priorities
Providers of other DevOps platforms reported similar upticks in activity during the same period. Moritz Plassnig, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Software Delivery Management and Software Delivery Automation Cloud at CloudBees, observed that many organizations had already been investing in custom application development to drive digital transformation. The pandemic compressed that timeline dramatically.
“The current situation has only accelerated that trend,” said Plassnig. Projects that were once medium-term strategic initiatives became immediate operational necessities, elevating the importance of reliable, scalable DevOps pipelines.
The Core Challenge: Making Sure the Right Code Gets Built at the Right Time
Distributed teams introduce coordination risk. Fred Simon, Chief Data Scientist at JFrog, identified feedback loops as the central problem: “Everyone needs feedback.”
Without the informal communication that happens naturally in a shared office—a quick question at a desk, overhearing a colleague’s conversation—developers can spend time on the wrong feature, duplicate work, or miss a blocking dependency. To compensate, engineering managers turned to:
- Video conferencing tools such as Zoom for synchronous check-ins and code reviews.
- Cloud-hosted DevOps platforms to ensure every team member has consistent access to CI/CD pipelines, artifact repositories, and shared tooling regardless of location.
- Asynchronous communication embedded directly in DevOps workflows, reducing the need to schedule meetings for every decision.
Asynchronous Collaboration Matters More Than Video Calls
Emrah Samdan, Vice President of Product at Thundra—a platform for securing and observing cloud-native microservices—argued that the communication tooling built into a DevOps platform is more important than ever in a remote-first environment. Developers collaborating asynchronously can share code snippets, review pull requests, and leave contextual comments on their own schedule, which often produces more thoughtful feedback than a rushed video call.
Samdan was direct about the hidden cost of synchronous-first culture: “A lot of productivity is being lost setting up Zoom calls.” The implication for DevOps teams is clear—invest in platforms and workflows that make asynchronous collaboration the default, and reserve synchronous meetings for decisions that genuinely require real-time discussion.
Survey Data: Remote Work Is Becoming Permanent—But Reactions Are Mixed
The organizational question is no longer whether remote work is possible, but whether it becomes the default. A PwC survey of chief financial officers conducted around this time found that nearly half of respondents (49%) planned to make remote work a permanent option for roles that support it.
Developer sentiment, according to a GitLab survey of workers from the same period, was split:
- 52% of employees reported being more productive working remotely.
- 48% reported being more efficient remotely.
The flip side of those numbers is significant: roughly half of the workforce did not share that positive view. Remote work is not universally beneficial, and engineering leaders need to account for varying preferences, home environments, and working styles when designing distributed team structures.
Teams With Remote Experience Had a Head Start
Brendan O’Leary, Senior Developer Evangelist at GitLab, pointed out that the pandemic did not create remote DevOps teams from scratch—it accelerated a trend that was already underway. Many software development teams had been gradually shifting toward more distributed work before COVID-19, building the tooling, documentation, and cultural practices needed to sustain it.
O’Leary noted that resources such as the GitLab Remote Playbook saw a significant increase in downloads during the early months of the pandemic, as teams scrambled to build structure around their new reality.
His broader observation is worth carrying forward: “I think it is a time that will see a real separation of bosses and leaders.” Effective engineering leadership in a remote context goes beyond tracking ticket velocity or deployment frequency. It means creating psychological safety, removing blockers asynchronously, and enabling teams to ship innovative software even without physical proximity.
What DevOps Teams Should Take Away
The experience of 2020 made several things clear for DevOps practitioners operating in distributed environments:
- Cloud-hosted tooling is table stakes. Teams dependent on on-premises infrastructure faced avoidable bottlenecks when offices closed. Migrating CI/CD, artifact management, and monitoring to cloud services reduces location dependency.
- Asynchronous-first workflows reduce coordination overhead. Design your processes so that the majority of decisions can be made and documented without scheduling a meeting.
- Feedback loops must be explicit and fast. In a co-located office, feedback is ambient. In a distributed team, it must be deliberately built into every stage of the pipeline—automated tests, code review processes, and deployment notifications all serve this function.
- Not every developer thrives remotely. Blanket policies in either direction—fully remote or fully in-office—will fail some portion of the team. The best outcomes come from intentional flexibility combined with strong async communication norms.
- Leadership matters more, not less, at a distance. Metrics are necessary but insufficient. Leaders who invest in clarity, autonomy, and documented decision-making will outperform those who rely on physical presence as a substitute for genuine management.
DevOps teams that had already adopted distributed practices before the pandemic demonstrated a measurable advantage. Building those practices into the fabric of how a team works—rather than treating them as an emergency adaptation—is the most durable lesson from this period.