Comparative Analysis of Job Satisfaction in Agile and Non-agile Software Development Teams

Software engineering is fundamentally driven by economics. One of the issues that software teams face is employee turnover which has a serious economic impact. The effect of job dissatisfaction on high turnover is consistently supported by evidence from multiple disciplines. The study investigates if and how job satisfaction relates to development processes that are being used and the determinants of job satisfaction across a wide range of teams, regions and employees. A moderate positive correlation between the level of experience with agile methods and the overall job satisfaction was found. The evidence suggests that there are twice as many members of agile teams who are satisfied with their jobs (vs members of non-agile teams). The ability to influence decisions that affect you, the opportunity to work on interesting projects, and the relationships with users were found to be statistically significant satisfiers.