Investigating the factors which influence the misalignment between developers and testers in agile organizations

The concept of alignment has been addressed in the context of various divisions within organizations but very little research investigates the alignment of the roles within specific sub-units in an organization. Research shows evidence of a misalignment between the role of the software tester and the software developer in software development teams specifically in organizations that adopt agile methodologies to manage their software development projects. It is this misalignment between these two roles and the lack of research on the factors that influence this phenomenon that prompted the study. The study aims to investigate the factors which influence misalignment between developers and testers in agile organizations with specific focus on the social dimension of alignment contrary to most studies that merely address the intellectual dimension of alignment. The research methodology followed a positivist, quantitative and deductive approach. An online questionnaire was designed and distributed to respondents in South Africa (SA) and United States of America (USA). The results show that there are four factors that have an overall influence on the misalignment between developers and testers in agile software development teams. These factors are (1) process non-compliance combined with lack of accountability, (2) conflicting interpersonal skills, (3) lack of shared domain knowledge, specifically lack of developers' knowledge about testing and (4) poor collaboration. Future research can proceed to identify the strategies that agile organizations can adopt alleviate this problem of misalignment.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of Information Systems

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Mbekela, Unathi

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Brown, Irwin

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/27298

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/27298