Stress in agile software development : practices and outcomes

Stress is an important workplace issue, affecting both the health of individuals, and the health of organizations. Early advocacy for Agile Software Development suggested it might help avoid stress, with practices that emphasize a sustainable pace, and self-organizing teams. Our analysis of a 2014 survey, however, suggested that stress might still be commonplace in Agile teams, especially for those with less experience. We also noticed that newcomers to Agile emphasized technical, rather than collaborative, practices, and speculated this might explain the stress. We explored this in our analysis of a follow-up survey conducted in 2016, and report our findings in this paper. We show that there are a variety of factors involved, and that avoiding stress is associated with both collaborative and technical practices, and a range of outcomes

Simulating the Impact of Cooperation and Management Strategies on Stress and Economic Performance

In this paper, we study the impact of the management evaluation strategies that are aimed at achieving a balance between rewarding the cooperative behavior of employees and their economic performance. We developed a model in the NetLogo simulation environment that incorporates many socioeconomic aspects such as the stress, effort, and productivity of employees as well as insights into managing cooperativeness and the performance of individual workers. We conducted a series of simulations, each representing a 10-year lifespan of an organization, and the results reveal that organizations achieve the highest performance when management prefers to reward the cooperative behavior of employees instead of performance. The detailed results are provided and discussed in the paper, as are the future directions that the research could take as well as possible extensions of the model presented

The Role of Work Engagement in Agile Software Development: Investigating Job Demands and Job Resources

Agile software development projects still show a high failure rate. Despite a growing amount of research, underlying reasons for project performance currently remain rare. Drawing on the job demands-resources theory, we propose a theoretical model of work engagement in agile software development teams. Using structural equation modeling, we found that agile practices diminish job demands (perceived workload and role ambiguity) and support job resources (perceived meaningfulness and job autonomy). Job resources have been found to be positively related to work engagement in agile software development teams. Our research contributes to the limited empirical understanding on work engagement in agile software development. For practitioners, our model provides tools to effectively manage team members’ work engagement

Why apply agile? - A literature review on work outcomes in agile information systems development

Agile information systems development (ISD) has become a popular way to manage IT projects. One of the key claims of agile ISD is to increase employees’ work outcomes, such as job satisfaction. However, the research landscape is heterogenous and lacks of a comprehensive overview. In this research, we set out to analyze and synthesize the current state of research on agile ISD and work outcomes by a systematic literature review. Overall, we found a trend of a positive relationship of agile ISD on work outcomes, although there is a variety of constructs that influence this relationship. We propose four directions for future research: perceptions of work, extended quantitative findings, multi-level effects and IT project success

The Impact of Agile Methodology on Software Team’s Work-Related Well-Being

Agile methodology is people-oriented.However, little evidence demonstrates the methodology effectiveness on humanistic aspects.Work-related well-being is measured to what extent the agile methodology can give impact on anxiety, contentment, depression, and enthusiasm level among software engineering (SE) teams.This paper aims to investigate empirically the effect of agile methodology on software development team’s work-related well-being.To achieve this goal, a comparison study was carried out in an academic setting. A quantitative approach using statistical analysis was used to investigate the effect. Results showed that agile does not significantly affect work-related well-being.Nonetheless, the team that is able to apply the agile practices as closely as possible experienced higher level of enthusiasm during software project.This study provides additional empirical data in software engineering research and practices specifically on human aspects.Further investigation needs to be carried out on the software projects with higher task complexity

Journey towards agility: Three decades of research on agile information systems development

After more than 15 years since the Agile Manifesto and extensive research on agile information systems developmentfor nearly three decades, a comprehensive body of knowledge is available and is constantly growing.Agile information systems developmentis considered an effective way for managing information systems developmentprojects in environments characterized by rapidly changing requirements. This study aims to shed light on the existing knowledge on agile information systems developmentby applying a structured literature review and computer aided analysis consisting of distinct text mining techniques. We analyzed a sample of 775papers and provide results from articles among the Senior Scholars’ Basket, selected information systems conferences,and selected journalsfrom management and computer science. Based on our approach, we are able to (1) evaluate key articles and journals, (2) analyze the development of agile information systems developmentresearch in the last three decades and, most importantly, (3) identify research foci of the past as well asgaps in our knowledge on agile information systems development for further research

Workforce Agility: Development and Validation of a Multidimensional Measure

The concept of workforce agility has become increasingly popular in recent years as agile individuals are expected to be better able to handle change and uncertainty. However, agility has rarely been studied in a systematic way. Relations between agility and positive work outcomes, such as higher performance or increased well-being, have often been suggested but rarely been empirically tested. Furthermore, several different workforce agility measures are used in the literature which complicates the comparison of findings. Recognizing these gaps in the literature, we developed a new workforce agility measure, compared this measure to established workforce agility measures, and empirically tested the relations of workforce agility with work outcomes. For this purpose, we surveyed participants from two samples (N1 = 218, N2 = 533). In a first step, we used Sample 1 to examine the factor structure of the measure for item selection. In a second step, we used Sample 2 to confirm the 10-factor structure and to compare the predictive validity of our measure along with two other agility measures. Findings demonstrate predictive validity for all three workforce agility scales, especially in relation to innovative performance. Furthermore, workforce agility related positively to task and innovative performance, organizational citizenship behavior, job satisfaction, and well-being

Estudio de mapeo sistemático de las herramientas y técnicas para la identificación de los niveles de agilidad del equipo de desarrollo en un proyecto de software

El presente estudio registra los instrumentos, herramientas y técnicas para identificar el nivel de agilidad, se realizó una investigación en base al Método del Mapeo Sistemático (SMS), se investigó en diferentes bibliotecas virtuales. Los instrumentos, herramientas y técnicas permiten identificar los niveles de agilidad tanto en las organizaciones y equipos. Se tiene como finalidad evaluar el conocimiento, además, el nivel de agilidad mediante diferentes escalas, al momento de desarrollar sus proyectos, contribuyen con el mejoramiento continuo.He present study records the instruments, tools and techniques to identify the level of agility, an investigation was carried out based on the Systematic Mapping Method (SMS), it was investigated in different virtual libraries. The instruments, tools and techniques allow to identify the levels of agility in both organizations and teams. The purpose is to evaluate knowledge, in addition, the level of agility through different scales, at the time of developing your projects, they contribute to continuous improvement

Comparative analysis of agile and traditional methodologies in IT project management

It is known that initially, during software development, the traditional methodology was used for all IT projects and projects were often unsuccessful due to the rapid growth of the IT industry, and then agile methodologies began to be developed. Traditional methods have some advantages over agile methodologies, and mostly the most common traditional methodology is Waterfall. Given that it has limitations in handling problems, such as unstructured code, team morale, poor visibility, lack of communication between stakeholders and frequent prioritization of user requirements, it would not be bad to use agile methodologies, which focus on working with users, continuous testing, refactoring and incremental development. This paper deals with the comparison of methodologies in IT project management based on other scientific research. Some of the mentioned methodologies are Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, etc. It was concluded that the agile Scrum methodology is mostly used in IT companies, with the combination of several methodologies often appearing, due to the need for projects, in order to eliminate the shortcomings of each methodology