Abstract:
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 plan driven
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.
