Attitudes, Beliefs, and Development Data Concerning Agile Software Development Practices
This research addresses how developer attitudes affect agile practices in software teams, but it is incremental as it focuses on student surveys and existing data analysis.
The study investigated perceptions of agile development practices in Scrum teams, finding that Scrum roles significantly influenced views and that version control usage was rated most aligned with Agile Manifesto values, with no significant evolution in perceptions over time among 42 student participants.
The perceptions and attitudes of developers impact how software projects are run and which development practices are employed in development teams. Recent agile methodologies have taken this into account, focusing on collaboration and shared team culture. In this research, we investigate the perceptions of agile development practices and their usage in Scrum software development teams. Although perceptions collected through surveys of 42 participating students did not evolve significantly over time, our analyses show that the Scrum role significantly impacted participants' views of employed development practices. We find that using the version control system according to agile ideas was consistently rated most related to the values of the Agile Manifesto. Furthermore, we investigate how common software development artifacts can be used to gain insights into team behavior and present the development data measurements we employed. We show that we can reliably detect well-defined agile practices, such Test-Driven Development, in this data and that usage of these practices coincided with participants' self-assessments.