Empirical insights into the perceived benefits of agile software engineering practices: a case study from SAP
Christoph Schmidt, Srinivasa Ganesha Venkatesha, Juergen Heymann · 2014
SAP AG has taught more than 4,000 developers the Agile Software Engineering methodology since 2010. As such, the company offers a unique setting to study its impact on developers' work. In this paper, we discuss how developers perceive the impact of pair programming and test automation on software quality, delivered feature scope, and various team work aspects. We draw our findings from a company-wide survey with answers from 174 developers working in 74 teams and 15 product owners from five locations world-wide. We complement our findings with insights from two in-depths case studies with two development teams. As expected, our findings confirm that the studied practices help developers develop better software. Deviating from existing preconceptions, however, the responding developers do not report a significant drop in their development speed. In addition, high adopters are more proud of their own contributions to the team, report a better team learning, and feel more motivated.