Title: Does agility provide motivation? A comparative study of developer motivation levels between agile and waterfall development methodologies

Authors: Srijith Sreenivasan; Krishnamurthy Kothandaraman

Addresses: KPMG, Pebble Beach, Domlur, Bangalore-560071, India ' KPMG, Pebble Beach, Domlur, Bangalore-560071, India

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to determine if the motivation level of engineers in agile projects is higher. The factors considered for measuring motivation are job involvement role, job involvement setting and work centrality. A quantitative survey was administrated using an online tool for this study. The research hypothesis was tested using Kruskal-Wallis test, which is a non-parametric test used for determining the statistical significance of population medians. The analysis reveals that the motivation level of engineers as measured by job involvement role and job involvement setting in agile is significantly higher than that of waterfall. However, the motivation level as measured by work centrality dimension did not demonstrate a statistically significant difference between agile and waterfall. The outcome of the study will be useful in the industry while designing improvement initiatives in agile with respect to people management.

Keywords: agile; waterfall; software development; employee motivation; lifecycle method; job involvement; work centrality; software engineers.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBEX.2024.137256

International Journal of Business Excellence, 2024 Vol.32 No.3, pp.320 - 338

Received: 13 May 2020
Accepted: 17 Feb 2021
Published online: 08 Mar 2024 *

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