Stress in Agile Software Development: Practices and Outcomes

Abstract

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.

»Im Overwrite-Modus überstürmt«

“…Mit Blick auf die agile Softwareentwicklung war zunächst die Hoffnung einer Reduktion von Stress verbunden. Die Veränderungen sind jedoch ambivalent, und die Ursachen werden als vielschichtig betrachtet (Meier et al 2018). Ein hoher Stresslevel trotz Agilität könnte mit dem Arbeiten in einem Krisenmodus zusammenhängen, der durch Charakteristika agiler Organisation, wie dauerhaften Wandel und kurze Iterationszyklen ohne Pausen, hervorgerufen wird (Laanti 2013).…”

Agiles Arbeiten in offenen Büroumgebungen und Mitarbeiterstress

“…In einer weiteren Untersuchung in drei finnischen Unternehmen mit insgesamt 44 Teilnehmern wird darüber berichtet, dass agiles Arbeiten Stress reduzieren kann ("results provide evidence that agile work could even out workload during a working period") [6]. Schließlich zeigen Befragungsdaten aus der Schweiz von 185 IT-Mitarbeitern aus dem agilen Umfeld (vorwiegend Softwareentwickler, Designer und Projektmanager), dass auf einer Skala von 1 (entspannt) bis 5 (sehr gestresst) der mit Abstand dominierende Wert 3 ist; der Stress wird somit vorwiegend als mittelmäßig ausgeprägt wahrgenommen [7]. Interessant ist hierbei, dass die Stresswerte mit den Werten auf die Frage nach dem Agilitätslevel (von 1 = mehrheitlich planbasiert bis 5 = mehrheitlich agil) kaum korrelierten.…”

A methodology for psycho-biological assessment of stress in software engineering

“…The aim is the replenishment of physical and cognitive resources which were consumed by the stressful tasks. Still, the stress experienced by knowledge workers, like software developers, has a wide range of research opportunities in terms of understanding and preventing generation of (chronic) stress and its effects (Meier et al, 2018;Ostberg et al, 2017).…”

“…Stress has been suggested to have detrimental effects on defect rates, team morale as well as motivation, software quality, maintainability, and requirements management (Meier et al, 2018). While short-term stress can be pushing and beneficial to software engineers, preliminary research suggests that we should find ways to reduce stress and develop tools for software development that help to reduce stress or at least are no sources of stress (Brown et al, 2018).…”

“…We discussed ways to reduce stress of developers elsewhere (Ostberg et al, 2017), but without strong and validated, yet easy to adopt methodologies to detect, assess, and understand stress responses of individuals and groups of developers, it is hard to produce sound statements on the efficiency of any stress reduction approach. For detecting stress, research in software engineering has focused on machine learning and data mining approaches, wearable technologies (Suni Lopez, Condori-Fernández & Catala Bolos, 2018), and ad-hoc questionnaires (Meier et al, 2018) so far Brown et al (2018) have offered a review of the few scattered studies-but we still see some research gaps, which we highlight in the next section, in terms of discovered knowledge as well as the way we borrow from established research from other disciplines.…”