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

A Theory of Software Development Methodologies

In this study, it is proposed that software development methodologies (SDMs), when looked at from the perspective of job design, offers interesting and useful insights. The increasing popularity of agile methods over plan-driven methods in the 2000’s mirror the increasing popularity of non-Taylorist job designs over Taylorist job designs in the 1980’s, when jobs were redesigned by adopting self-managed teams and work groups, and creating employee programs like quality circles with salutary results. This study finds the widely accepted (JCM) Job Characteristic Model (Hackman and Qldham, 1976) for job design relevant in providing a theoretical foundation for the atheoretical domain of SDMs. JCM provides a structural framework for practice to understand what they are doing right and what needs to change by diagnosing the characteristics of the software development processes in need of improvement and making recommendations for tailoring SDMs for superior work outcomes

Agile software development in a context of plan-based organizations

Agile software development has increasingly been used in the last fifteen years with the goal of improving traditionally time-consuming and rather non-user friendly process of developing software code. As implications of agile development and its impact on employees are still unclear, it is important to understand the benefits, opportunities and limitations of this development or collaboration mechanism. Thus, empirical evidence with implications for decision makers in the field of corporate policy and software development is an open research field. This master thesis analyzes the potentials of agile software development and how this approach can be used to support the development processes in companies, in terms of efficiency, shorter time-to-market as well as better customer fit of the developed products or services. By exploring some of the key features of different methods and processes, the potentials and limitations of the selected approaches are analyzed and linked to recent literature insights

Agile software development in a context of plan-based organizations

Agile software development has increasingly been used in the last fifteen years with the goal of improving traditionally time-consuming and rather non-user friendly process of developing software code. As implications of agile development and its impact on employees are still unclear, it is important to understand the benefits, opportunities and limitations of this development or collaboration mechanism. Thus, empirical evidence with implications for decision makers in the field of corporate policy and software development is an open research field. This master thesis analyzes the potentials of agile software development and how this approach can be used to support the development processes in companies, in terms of efficiency, shorter time-to-market as well as better customer fit of the developed products or services. By exploring some of the key features of different methods and processes, the potentials and limitations of the selected approaches are analyzed and linked to recent literature insights

WHAT MOTIVATES TEAM MEMBERS AND USERS OF AGILE PROJECTS?

Users and teams members of agile projects have consistently shown higher motivation and satisfaction compared with projects that use plan-driven methods. User satisfaction is a key measure of IS success if not synonymous with it (Delone and McLean, 1992; Seddon, 1997) and higher team member motivation is known to foster productivity, company loyalty and higher levels of engagement (Locke and Latham, 1990; Meyer and Allen, 1997; Pinder, 1998). Various explanations have been offered for this salutary phenomenon and have as their basis the specific characteristics of Agile methodologies such as people focus, higher levels of user involvement and collaborative development approach (Boehm and Turner, 2005; Dybå and Dingsøyr, 2009; Mann and Maurer, 2005). In this study we apply the approach-avoidance theory to suggest “closure effect” as another explanation for the phenomena

Gender Equality With Agile In Software Engineering

Women are under-represented in information technology careers in general and in the profession of software development in particular and their numbers are declining. Previous studies on this topic have investigated whether the reason for this is due to a difference in capability arising out of their gender, or whether the reason arises from social factors. A software development methodology called “Agile†has arisen in recent years which focus on collaboration, working software, and a sustainable workweek. Studies have shown that adopting Agile techniques in the classroom helps to retain women in computer information academic curricula and that adopting them in workplace teams improves communication across gender and ethnic diversity. This study invited women to speak for themselves as to whether they find Agile engineering techniques helpful in the workplace through the use of an online survey and follow-up interviews. The results revealed that women feel positively about these practices but have encountered some resistance to adopting them. Future studies discerning whether there are differences in the attitudes of men and women to these practices or whether there is a correlation between adoption of these practices and the number of women practicing as software developers in varying environments are logical future research topics to extend understanding in this are

Investigating the Role of Stakeholders in Agile Information Systems Development Projects: A Mixed Methods Approach

Agile information systems development (ISD) strives for a high amount of interaction between the agile team and stakeholders to ensure that high quality software within commonly defined project goals is produced. The literature has acknowledged that agile ISD significantly changes the work of team members. How do agile practices affect the work of stakeholders? Unfortunately, little theory exists to answer this question. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the effect of agile practices on stakeholders’ job satisfaction. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, we use a review of the literature with an exploratory case study to develop the theoretical model, which was evaluated with a survey among stakeholders in agile ISD projects. We contribute to agile ISD literature by providing empirical evidence on stakeholders’ job satisfaction and highlight the relevance of interaction and collaboration between team members and stakeholders in agile ISD projects

Agile methods for agile universities

We explore a term, Agile, that is being used in various workplace settings, including the management of universities. The term may have several related but slightly different meanings. Agile is often used in the context of facilitating more creative problem-solving and advocating for the adoption, design, tailoring and continual updating of more innovative organizational processes. We consider a particular set of meanings of the term from the world of software development. Agile methods were created to address certain problems with the software development process. Many of those problems have interesting analogues in the context of universities, so a reflection on agile methods may be a useful heuristic for generating ideas for enabling universities to be more creative