# Team Resilience under Shock: An Empirical Analysis of GitHub Repositories during Early COVID-19 Pandemic

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12326 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12326/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Distribution-Free Predictive Inference For Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04173/) (2016)
- [How Work From Home Affects Collaboration: A Large-Scale Study of Information Workers in a Natural Experiment During COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15584/) (2020)
- [Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00922/) (2015)
- [Predicting Individual Treatment Effects of Large-scale Team Competitions in a Ride-sharing Economy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07364/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Emoji Promotes Developer Participation and Issue Resolution on GitHub](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16360/) (2023)
- [Beyond Code Contributions: How Network Position, Temporal Bursts, and Code Review Activities Shape Contributor Influence in Large-Scale Open Source Ecosystems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06426/) (2026)
- [Predicting Open Source Software Sustainability with Deep Temporal Neural Hierarchical Architectures and Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09064/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.