Satisfaction and its correlates in agile software development

Abstract

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.