Best practices for work from home: A qualitative survey in open source and distributed software development

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that broke out in 2020, companies switched to working from home on a large scale. Now, in 2025, many employees are working from home entirely or are only in the office irregularly. This has created a new working environment for many software professionals that resembles both the distributed software development (DSD) and open source software development (OSS) models. While working from home or a hybrid work environment is relatively new for many organizations (about 5 years), the challenges in DSD and OSS development have already been widely researched. Our research question focuses on best practices derived from OSS and DSD that solve the current challenges of working from home. We conducted a qualitative survey and interviewed fifteen individuals who have experience with DSD or OSS development. In this paper, we present fourteen proposed best practices for remote communication, collaboration, management, and tooling. Using the context-problem-solution pattern, we go beyond presenting high-level practices and suggest actionable details. The results of the study provide insights into this topic with high industry relevance. At the same time, the study contributes to existing academic research on working from home and the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. • Some OSS and DSD best practices solve current work from home challenges. • Proposed best practices are in management, communication, collaboration, and tooling. • Management - people-oriented management and promotion of autonomous decision making. • Collaboration - parallel processing of multiple tasks and status communication. • Communication - maintaining personal relationships and personal contact. • Tooling - There are a number of tools that best support distributed software development. • Our theory (actionable patterns) may improve work from home in software development.