2020-06, Kropp, Martin, Meier, Andreas, Anslow, Craig, Biddle, Robert

In this paper we address the topic of software development team members satisfaction with their development process. We present an in-depth analysis of the results of a nationwide survey about software development in Switzerland. We wanted to find out if satisfaction relates to the applied development method, and to the use of various practices, and impacts on business, team and software issues. We found that higher satisfaction is reported more by those using Agile development than with plan-driven processes. We explored the different perspectives of developers and those with a management role and found a high consistency of satisfaction between Agile developers and Agile management, and differences with those using working plan-driven methods. We found that certain practices and impacts have high correlations to satisfaction, and that collaborative processes are closely related to satisfaction. We then explored the relationship between satisfaction and various other perspectives. Our results in this analysis are principally descriptive, but we think they can be a relevant contribution to understand the challenges for everyone involved in Agile development.

2013-12, Kropp, Martin, Meier, Andreas

Several recent surveys show that agile methodologies like Scrum, Extreme Programming and Kanban have been successfully adopted by many companies for software development. However, the same surveys show that only few of the agile practices are applied consequently and thoroughly. This is to a great extent due to the lack of skilled personnel. In this paper we propose a more holistic approach for teaching agile software development, in which the required agile practices and values are not only integrated theoretically into our courses but also practically applied. The proposed concept was realized in a new a course at Zurich University of Applied Sciences during 2012. The evaluation shows very encouraging results.

2018, Kropp, Martin, Meier, Andreas, Anslow, Craig, Biddle, Robert

The principles behind the Agile Manifesto begin with "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer...". It also states that Agile projects should be build around motivated and self-organized teams, which might also lead to more satisfied developers. Several studies indeed report an increased job satisfaction by anecdotal evidence. In this paper we address the topic of satisfaction by in-depth analysis of the results of a nationwide survey about software development in Switzerland. We wanted to find out if satisfaction depends on the applied development method, and, more concrete, how satisfaction relates to other elements in the development process, including the use of various practices, and the influences on business, team and software issues.

2014-12, Kropp, Martin, Meier, Andreas

Various studies show that the agile method has become a mainstream methodology for software development. When agile pioneers introduced this approach, they executed very successful projects which lead to the enormous popularity of agile development. With becoming mainstream, less experienced teams started to apply the agile approaches and news about failed agile projects appeared. This raises the question, what it needs to conduct successful agile projects. In a qualitative study we asked IT companies about the essential success factors in their successful agile projects. We found that there was a strong focus on engineering and management best practices. We found that when these practices did not work, mature teams sensed that following a recipe is not sufficient, and they started adapting the agile process to their needs. Applying a sense-making methodology like the Cynefin framework, theoretically explains our observations in the study.