MyAgile: Sociological and Cultural Effects of Agile on Teams and Their Members

Two main concepts in Agile software development are self-organized teams and direct contact with the customer or Product Owner. Additionally, constant feedback on different levels is considered to be of high importance. With constant feedback, transparency goes hand-in-hand. Compared to traditional software development, Agile approaches have much higher transparency, and this might be a problem for some people. What does it feel like to work in such an Agile team or organization for the individual? How do the software developers, testers or other team members experience this environment of high transparency and continuous feedback? In this paper we focus on a subset of the third Swiss Agile Study from 2016, a nationwide survey about software development, to shed some light on the sociological, cultural and cognitive aspects of Agile teams and their individual member. We found that despite the increased transparency, the majority of the participants reported working in an Agile environment, both on the individual and on the team level, as positive and satisfying. The analysis shows these positive influences have some strong correlations with certain Agile practices and with innovation and business aspects.