Intro to agile methods pdf free download

Using agile methods, developers can also more easily resolve situations of role conflict. Developers in self-organized teams are empowered to make relevant development decisions and can thus decide to follow the expectations that are more congruent with their team goals.

Self-organization inherent to agile methods consequently provides software developers with a sense of control that reduces role conflict. Similarly, the core values underlying agile methods reduce the potential for conflicting expectations toward individual developers.

For example, agile methods consistently emphasize software quality over following a process or creating detailed documentation. These core values guide decisions and thus reduce the chance for developers to get caught between conflicting expectations, for example, between the expectations of project managers pushing for clean documenta- tion and process adherence on the one hand and customers pushing for the rapid and complete development of the software product on the other hand.

Lastly, agile methods help reduce role conflict through short, structured development iterations that entail col- laborative interactions with team members and customers.

Collaborative agile practices such as pair programming, daily meetings, and continuous integration stimulate communication and exchange between developers about solu- tion strategies, development obstacles, and intermediary work results.

The use of agile methods thereby facilitates the mutual adjustment of developers and helps them establish shared perspectives that reduce the risk of conflicting role expectations toward individual developers. Short development cycles entail frequent exchange of software developers with customers and other stakeholders about product increments, customer needs, and development goals.

These regular interactions help developers reduce the salience of the strong boundary between customers and developers. Plan-driven development methods typically span this boundary with specific roles and personnel eg, business analysts who often face role conflict because expectations toward them differ on the two sides of the boundary Baroudi, ; Joseph et al.

Agile methods, by contrast, have cus- tomers and developers interact frequently and force them to regularly discuss small product increments.

These inter- actions and discussions help both groups to align their expectations and reduce the chance of role conflict in developers. Thus, we hypothesize: H1: The extent of agile method use will be negatively associated with role conflict.

Using agile methods, software developers engage in communication and knowledge sharing with team members and other stakeholders to self-organize their development activities. Developers can use these discussions to solicit more information about the expectations of team members, managers, and customers about them and about their work output. The frequent, informal discussions help to achieve a common understanding of requirements, chal- lenges, and areas of developer expertise Kudaravalli et al.

They thereby reduce ambiguity in who should do what in a software development team and help each developer understand their personal role in it. Conse- quently, informally exchanged knowledge about team members' expertise and mutual expectations allow developers in such teams to shape their own roles and get a clearer understanding of their responsibilities. Agile methods moreover make developers iteratively collect feedback from customers and team members that reduces uncertainty about their expectations.

It helps establish clearly understood and agreed upon target visions for the next steps of a project. In particular, iterative evaluations of their work results allow developers to refine their understanding of the problem domain and even force them to explicitly adapt their goals Ramesh et al.

This aids in making developers' own expectations of themselves clearer and less ambiguous. Imitating coding styles, design patterns, and problem-solving strategies of colleagues, for example, lets team mem- bers implicitly come to joint perspectives on challenges and supports the emergence of common norms.

The close collaboration enforced by agile methods thereby results in clearer developer expectations of each other. Thus, we hypothesize: H2: The extent of agile method use will be negatively associated with role ambiguity.

As such, the beneficial effects of agile method use on role conflict and role ambiguity may be particularly pronounced for developers with extensive organizational skills because organizational skills facilitate interpersonal interactions and direct communi- cation that are crucial elements of effective agile method use.

Whereas plan-driven methods build on specialized role definitions and authoritative task assignments by managers, generalist members of self-organized agile teams need to engage in discussions with their team to understand and clarify their implicit roles Hummel et al. For example, developers may realize that their colleagues expect them to work on tasks that do not fit their own percep- tions of their roles and responsibilities.

Developers with better organiza- tional skills can more easily understand the specific arguments of their counterparts in such discussions and can clar- ify the situations based on sound argumentation and persuasive reasoning.

Better organizational skills thereby allow developers to communicate more easily with their team members to reduce role conflict during agile method use. In contrast, lack of organizational skills may be particularly harmful for developers' role perceptions when using agile methods.

As such, lack of organizational skills may result in a failure to resolve conflicting expectations in agile devel- opment contexts because agile methods repudiate formal, specialized roles and hierarchies. The distribution of roles and responsibilities in agile teams thereby becomes subject to group dynamics, and developers cannot point to formal role specifications that would help them make their point.

Developers in agile teams who lack organizational skills will therefore more frequently run into role conflicts with team members, customers, and managers that they are unable to resolve. Thus, we hypothesize: H3: Organizational skills will moderate the negative relationship between the extent of agile method use and role conflict, such that the relationship will be stronger at higher levels of organizational skills.

Individuals possessing better organizational skills may use these meetings to seek more effective clarification and understand existing expectations and requirements more easily.

Developers with better organizational skills may more eas- ily conduct these activities and thereby reflect more effectively on their activities, roles, skills, and responsibilities.

They may therefore face less role ambiguity when using agile methods. In contrast, developers who lack organiza- tional skills may experience high role ambiguity and high job strain when using agile methods. As such, the lack of formal developer role descriptions in agile methods forces developers to understand the specifics of their roles pri- marily based on informal interpersonal communication Hummel et al.

For developers who lack organizational skills, it is, however, harder to discern the meaning behind others' suggestions and comments during such informal encounters. They may thus face particularly strong challenges in clearly understanding all facets of their roles and the expectations that others have.

Failure to communicate effectively with team members may moreover be particu- larly stressful for developers who are frequently forced to engage in intense collaborative agile practices, like pair programming, with their colleagues. They may more frequently fail to comprehend the meaning of team members' problem analyses and proposed solutions, leaving them with unclear expectations about the task at hand, the roles of others, and their own role.

Thus, we hypothesize: H4: Organizational skills will moderate the negative relationship between the extent of agile method use and role ambigu- ity, such that the relationship will be stronger at higher levels of organizational skills. Prior work has consistently suggested that role conflict and role ambiguity are linked to negative outcomes such as job dissatisfaction, anxiety, exhaustion, reduced job engagement, and turnover intentions Joseph et al. Conflicting and ambiguous role perceptions are problematic because they obfuscate the clear and single flow of authority within organizations that allows employees to experience less uncertainty, increase accountability, and discern meaning about their positions regarding how they will be evaluated Rizzo et al.

When multiple expectations from different sources are introduced, employees need to cognitively and emotionally cope with more demands that cannot necessarily be reconciled. In software development, incongruent expectations of developers' behaviour and unclear responsibilities both put high strain on software engineers and cause them psychological stress Windeler et al. Collecting and evalu- ating role-related information from these various sources creates an additional burden on developers Joseph et al.

Lastly, developers within the interdependent structures of a team need to work with and rely on the output of their team members in order to benefit from team work rather than working alone Espinosa et al. In this context, role ambiguity and role conflict reduce individ- uals' sense of control over their own work and the possibility to do justice to their responsibilities, resulting in anxi- ety and stress Wang et al.

Thus, we hypothesize: H5: Role ambiguity will be positively associated with work exhaustion. H6: Role conflict will be positively associated with work exhaustion. In sum, our research model suggests that agile method use facilitates the achievement of clear and unambiguous role perceptions and thereby reduces work exhaustion for developers, particularly if they possess the organizational skills to effectively interact with others in their organization. The developers worked mostly in projects to custom develop and provide software solutions for clients.

The software vendor used agile methods in their portfolio of development methodologies. Although there were no fixed rules about the application of agile software develop- ment methods, the company encouraged its developers to make use of the agile development practices of XP. Development teams could draw from a broad set of software development methods, and developers would engage to different degrees in agile practices.

The developers in our sample therefore all had a basic understanding of various agile methods. Once companies have progressed beyond the initial adoption of agile methods, such situa- tions of process diversity with developers applying multiple different methods to varying degrees over time are quite common in the software industry Ramasubbu et al. We focused on XP as the agile method of our investigation given its use by the software vendor. XP consists of 12 specific practices, namely, the planning game, small releases, use of metaphor, simple design, coding standards, collective ownership, sustainable pace, testing, refactoring, pair programming, continuous integration, and involve- ment of an on-site customer Beck, Together, these practices instantiate the core values of the agile mani- festo.

Prior research has examined their use in different settings Ramesh et al. We approached the developers via the company's management team who invited them to par- ticipate in our two-stage survey. We discarded responses from developers who did not complete both surveys. These exclusions resulted in a final sample of individual-level data from developers who worked in software development projects. The average age in our sample was On average, developers had 3.

To minimize potential nonresponse bias, we obtained demographic data of everyone in our sampling frame and compared them with our sample. The measurement scales can be found in the Appendix A. Where not indicated oth- erwise, constructs were measured with multiple items on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 strongly disagree to 7 strongly agree.

To create variable scores, we averaged the responses to the respective items. These practices are identified as instru- mental in enabling software development teams to respond to requirement changes Maruping et al. In total, the measure consisted of 18 items three for each XP practice that we averaged to create a score for the extent of agile method use.

Although it could be reasonably argued that these practices should each be modelled as separate constructs, given our conceptualization and the fact that in our dataset, the correlations ranged from.

Although recent research has proposed refined scales for role conflict and role ambiguity Bowling et al. First, the scales by Bowling et al. Second, the scales of Rutner et al. Using these scales allows for easier comparisons to prior work. This scale focuses on emotional exhaustion as an integral element and measureable symptom of job burnout and as an established predictor of turn- over intentions Joseph et al.

We thereby ensured that any significant effects of agile method use were not caused by a lack of job experience or experience with agile methods. As prior research suggested that they may influence coping behaviours and exhaustion of employees, we further controlled for perceived autonomy and perceived fairness of rewards Furuyama et al.

Moreover, workload is known as an important factor associated with work exhaustion Moore, ; Ply et al. We therefore controlled for perceived workload to examine whether the effects of role perceptions are relevant for software developers' work exhaustion beyond the effects of workload.

At a project level, we controlled for team size and requirements uncertainty because they can make it harder to establish clear and unambiguous role perceptions Windeler et al.

After exclusions, as described earlier eg, overlapping team members , we collected data in two waves during the projects—ie, at the beginning and at the end of the project. The projects lasted between 80 and days, consistent with the general philosophy underlying agile projects. In the first wave, we measured job skills, capabilities, and prior training, ie, organizational skills, experience in software development, and experience in XP.

After the projects, we obtained the scores for team size, requirements uncertainty, and the presence of a client representative from archival data. Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics, reliabilities, and correlations. Convergent and discriminant validity were assessed using factor analysis with oblimin rotation allowing for correlated factors.

All items loaded significantly on their specified constructs, with factor loadings greater than. Cronbach alpha exceeded. A power analysis suggested that our sample size of developers was large enough to detect even small effects with the conventionally assumed power of. We used random coefficient modelling RCM to test our model. Specifically, we employed the R studio multi- level package for data analysis. We chose RCM for its capability to adequately account for the nested nature of our data.

In our sample, developers were nested in projects. To establish that it is reasonable to use a multilevel RCM approach, we first ran a two-level null model with no predictors included. This reinforced the need to control for project-level effects. Following Venkatesh et al. The resulting attenuation was below 0. This test further reduces the concern for common method bias. Models 1a and 1b represent the baseline models, models 2a and 2b represent the main effects only models, and models 3a and 3b represent the moderated models.

All models account for the nested nature of our data. In H1 and H2, we predicted that a larger extent of agile method use would be negatively associated with developers' perceptions of role ambiguity and role conflict.

To understand the nature of the interactions, we plotted the signifi- cant interactions, per Aiken and West Figure 2A,B illustrates the simple slopes of agile method use on role ambiguity and role conflict, respectively, at high and low values of organizational skills ie, 1 SD above and below the mean.

As shown in Figure 2A,B, a larger extent of agile method use is more negatively related to role ambiguity and role conflict when developers have high organizational skills than when they have low organizational skills. This sug- gests that organizational skills amplify the relationship between agile method use and clearer and less ambiguous role perceptions.

Taken together, these results provide support for our H3 and H4 on the moderating relationship of organizational skills. Age Gender 0. Tenure 2. Experience in 3. Experience in XP 1. Perceived workload 5. Autonomy 5. Fairness of rewards 4. Team size 8. Client representative 0.

Requirements Extent of agile method 4. Organizational skills 4. Role ambiguity 4. Role conflict 4. Work exhaustion 5. Standard errors are shown in parentheses. Table 2B shows the results of the RCM analysis predicting work exhaustion based on role conflict and role ambiguity. Two individual-level control variables—age and workload—and two project-level control variables— requirements uncertainty and the presence of a client representative—have significant effects on work exhaustion, but their path coefficients are lower for the model including role ambiguity and role conflict model 2.

This lends support to the reasoning that the effects of agile method use through role perceptions have a significant impact on developers' work exhaustion beyond project-level effects and beyond workload effects that have been suggested by prior work Tuomivaara et al. We next examined the direct and indirect effects of the extent of agile method use on work exhaustion in more detail. To do so, we conducted a moderated mediation analysis following Edwards and Lambert in which boo- tstrapping was used to create bias-corrected confidence intervals and simple effects.

F I G U R E 2 A, Interaction effect of agile method use and organizational skills on role ambiguity; B, Interaction effect of agile method use and organizational skills on role conflict [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.

It outlines the simple effects of agile method use on developers' work exhaustion as mediated by role conflict and role ambiguity and moderated by organizational skills.

The results indicate that a larger extent of agile method use has significant negative indirect, direct, and total effects on developers' work exhaustion that are all sig- nificantly stronger for higher levels of organizational skills. The results thus provide strong support for the hypothe- sized moderating effect of organizational skills. The indirect and direct effects of agile method use on work exhaustion are negative and significant when mediated by role ambiguity and role conflict.

This suggests that the mediated effects of agile method use and its interaction with organizational skills through role perceptions entail sig- nificant consequences for individual developers' work exhaustion.

More specifically, the results show that role ambi- guity and role conflict partially mediate the effects of agile method use on software developers' work exhaustion conditional on organizational skills. Although this partial mediation lends support to our reasoning in H1 through H6, it also suggests that role perceptions are not the only mechanism through which agile method use influences work exhaustion in software developers.

We further took procedural precautions to demonstrate the robustness of our results. Specifically, endo- geneity could constitute a problem for our results if the extent of agile method use or organizational skills were endogenous to role perceptions that would result in omitted variable bias or selection bias Wooldridge, Thus, we took several steps to rule out potential threats of endogeneity.

First, as part of our research design, the multi-wave data collection reduced endogeneity concerns because effects that occurred and were measured later in the projects eg, role perceptions and work exhaustion could unlikely influence what occurred and was mea- sured earlier in the projects eg, organizational skills.

Originally intended to correct estimates for selection bias, this approach is often used to rule out broader endogeneity threats Venkatesh et al. Appendix B reports the results of this procedure.

The results do not hint toward any endogeneity threats and indicate that selection bias does not constitute a threat to our analyses see Appendix B. Third, we followed the approach suggested by Frank to assess the danger of possible omitted variable bias. We calculated the impact threshold for a confounding variable ITCV at which an omitted variable would render the effect of an independent variable eg, extent of agile method use on a dependent variable eg, role ambiguity or role conflict nonsignificant.

Results for direct, indirect, and total effects following Edwards and Lambert Bootstrap estimates based on resamples. TABLE 4 Key contributions Research Stream This Study's Key Contribution to the Research Stream Effects of agile development Beyond its established effects on workload, the use of agile development methods on work exhaustion methods is associated with lower work exhaustion in developers through clearer and more congruent role perceptions.

Skills in software development Organizational skills are an important lever for developers to effectively cope with agile methods. The established assumption that developers primarily need technical skills and experience, rather than organizational skills, does not hold anymore in agile development environments.

Effectiveness of software Prior work suggested that agile methods improve development outcomes development methods primarily through better project-level control. We show that agile methods additionally allow developers to increase control at the individual level. This calls for further multilevel investigations. Of all these relationships, the relationship of the extent of agile method use with role ambiguity showed to be the least robust against omitted variable bias.

Still, a potential omitted variable would have to be correlated with both the extent of agile method use and role ambiguity at more than 0.

Given that this is much higher than the correlations observed in our sample see Table 1 , we deem it unlikely that an omitted variable could fulfil these conditions.

As all other effects were even more robust, there are no indications that omitted vari- able bias would constitute an issue for our results. In sum, these precautions heavily reduce endogeneity concerns regarding H1 to H4. This was accomplished by developing and testing a model suggesting that agile method use facilitates the achievement of clear and unambiguous role perceptions and thereby reduces work exhaustion for developers, particularly if they possess the organizational skills to effectively interact with others in their organization.

We found strong support for our model in a field study on software developers in project teams that used agile methods. Our findings have several theoretical and practical implications. Table 4 outlines the key contributions of our study. This finding is important because work exhaustion in software developers leads to program- ming errors and subsequently high maintenance costs, reduces team performance, and increases employee turnover Furuyama et al.

A better understanding of how the use of pop- ular agile methods influences software developers' work exhaustion consequently helps to better understand suc- cess and failure in contemporary software development projects. Prior work in this area has primarily taken a project management perspective and found that agile methods reduce work exhaustion by distributing the workload in soft- ware development projects more evenly over time Tuomivaara et al. Our work thus provides a new, behavioural explanation of individual-level effects of agile method use on developers' work exhaustion.

Whereas workload effects hinge primarily on the project-wide use of agile methods for project management Tuomivaara et al. Future research on the effectiveness of software development methods needs to take into account that methods such as XP may not only change project management activities but also have distinctive effects on individual developers' role perceptions and work exhaustion.

Although a moder- ated mediation analysis lent strong support to our research model and the indirect effects of agile method use on work exhaustion through role perceptions, it also showed significant direct effects of agile method use on work exhaustion that were not mediated by role perceptions. Future research should investigate the mechanisms that underlie these unexplained direct effects to further extend the emerging stream of research on the effects of agile methods on individual software developers Balijepally et al.

Second, our work shows that software developers' organizational skills facilitate the benefits of agile methods in terms of improved role perceptions and reduced work exhaustion.

Based on the JDCM, we found empirical support for our theorizing that the use of agile methods places specific demands on software developers that they can best address if they possess organizational skills to effectively manage interpersonal communication and group dynamics. This finding is important because prior work on the effects of agile methods has not fully accounted for individual- level differences between software developers. Specifically, prior work could not explain why some software devel- opers become less exhausted from using agile methods than others who perceive the exact opposite Balbes, ; Laanti, Tapping into this gap, our work suggests that organizational skills facilitate software developers' inter- actions with team members and external stakeholders that become necessary when following agile methods.

Organi- zational skills thereby allow developers to reap the benefits of agile methods. In line with this reasoning, a moderated mediation analysis showed that the use of agile methods without appropriate organizational skills resulted in significantly higher levels of role ambiguity, role conflict, and work exhaustion in software developers.

The more general literature on the effects of software development methodologies learns from our research that dis- tinct developer skills can decide about the favourable or unfavourable effects of software development methodolo- gies.

We add to this stream of research by pinpointing the importance of specific skills, rather than experience, for coping with job demands and preventing work exhaustion during soft- ware development.

Third, our findings contribute to research on the importance of technical and organizational skills in software development eg, Ang et al. Prior work often argued that software developers primar- ily need technical skills and that deficiencies in organizational skills should not be as dramatic for them as for other occupational groups Gallagher et al. Our findings show that this assumption is questionable with regard to contemporary software development.

Given the widespread use of agile methods, developers may increasingly need organizational skills to effectively apply these methods.

In fact, agile software development today appears to follow predictions by Lee et al. Lastly, prior research has shown that agile methods are particularly beneficial for outcomes in projects with high complexity and requirements volatility Maruping et al.

Extant theory holds that this advantage results from improved project-level control structures Maruping et al. Our findings add to this view by suggesting that agile methods not only improve the project-level control but also allow developers to increase control at the individual level as they gain less conflicting and less ambiguous role perceptions.

In fact, recent work suggests that especially multi-level views on developer role perceptions can strongly improve our understanding of project performance Windeler et al.

Our findings call this practice into question, at least for software developers working with agile methods. Our results suggest that software companies that are interested in preventing work exhaustion and burnout of their developers should provide training in organizational skills and agile methods, or they need to make sure that their software developers already have these skills when they are hired.

Role conflict and role ambiguity are especially prevalent in software projects with high technical risk and requirements volatility Windeler et al.

Our results show that agile methods can be used to reduce role con- flict and role ambiguity. From an individual-level perspective, agile methods may therefore fit particularly well with high risk projects and volatile requirements. Lastly, software vendors can learn in which way the use of agile development methods relates to one of their core resources, namely, software developers.

The increased application of agile methods is associated with reduced software developers' work exhaustion. To preserve the long-term performance and employability of their devel- opers, even conservative organizations may consequently want to utilize agile methods, at least to a certain degree in some of their projects.

Future research may want to replicate our study using the refined conceptualizations and measurements of role conflict and role ambiguity that were proposed in recent research Bowling et al. Although we controlled for a number of potentially confounding var- iables, there are also other sources of job strain possibly related to agile methods that this study did not account for.

For example, time pressure, project complexity, and the temporal distribution of workload affect how developers feel and how they interact with their team members Maruping et al. Likewise, process maturity and how well a software development method is implemented in a project might influence developers' role perceptions Ramasubbu et al. Given that such factors would influence all members of a project team in the same way and that our RCM analysis controlled for project-level nonindependence of observations, our results are to some degree robust against the confounding effects of these factors.

Moreover, our robustness checks for potential omitted variable bias did not raise any concerns. None- theless, we suggest that future research should examine these potential sources of job strain and their effects more explicitly. Future research may also investigate psychological and performance-related outcomes that can have more complex relationships with job strain Onyemah, Yet, there are other agile methods.

The amount of collaborative development work may, however, influence how often developers can engage with team members, users, customers, and external stakeholders to seek mutual understanding and clarify their roles.

Future research should therefore examine how other agile development methods influence role perceptions. For example, qualitative investigations into multiple other development methods may be used to extend and complement our quantitative results. In addition, our study was set in a context where XP had already been introduced as the company's choice of agile method.

This meant that XP was one method in the company's overall portfolio of development methods. XP was therefore used selectively and to varying degrees of intensity. Such selective use of development methods is typical for most organizations in the software industry that have progressed beyond the initial adoption of agile methods Ramasubbu et al.

Yet, we did not study the introduction of agile methods or a comparison of projects that exclusively used either agile or plan-driven methods. Consequently, our findings do not speak to the question of whether the introduction of agile methods alle- viates developers' work exhaustion or possibly even causes more role conflict and role ambiguity.

All the agile models come with iterations or Sprints that are much shorter in duration varying from two weeks to two months. During this period, the pre-determined features are delivered. The Agile models generally have one or more iterations and deliver the entire project at the end of the last iteration. All the feature in the agile way of working are completed in terms of development, testing, design and rework prior to the end of the process.

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