Agile Methods and Motivation: A Position Paper
Nathan Baddoo, Tracy Hall, DN Wilson · OPUS - Open Publications of UTS Scholars (University of Technology Sydney) · 2004
Even though it has been widely acknowledged that human factors are critically important to effective software development processes, they continue to be neglected in the industry.One such human factor is the motivation needs of software developers.In this paper we argue that plandriven software development methods do not satisfy the motivation needs of software developers, who have been shown to have significantly different motivation needs.This is because plan-driven development methods have been derived from the manufacturing and engineering disciplines and thus tend to be more predictive and less people oriented.We hypothesise that agile development methods may better satisfy the motivation needs of software developers because they happen to be adaptive and essentially peope oriented.In this paper, we propose a programme of research to investigate the impact of agile methods on software developers' motivation needs.This programme of research should include a comparative study of how motivation needs are met in planned-driven versus agile environments.We suggest that the results of this study can provide useful insight into the factors that can improve software developers' performance.