Agile and Wellbeing -- Stress, Empowerment, and Performance in Scrum and Kanban Teams

Little research data exist about agile teams and wellbeing. After changing our software engineering mode to agile, we wanted to find out if people experienced more or less stress than before. This study is based on a company-wide survey of 466 software engineering practitioners. We asked about their subjective feelings about stress, empowerment, and performance in their respective engineering teams after they had started to use agile methods. The results reveal that the feelings of higher performance improvement and sustainable pace are related, and that this difference is statistically significant. Respondents who feel that their team is empowered also feel less stress. However, no significant difference in feelings of stress and empowerment was found between respondents working in Kanban and Scrum mode after transition to agile. The group that was improving its performance because of agile was also reporting a better workload balance. The group that was experiencing worse performance because of agile methods was also more stressed. The differences may be explained by the management styles being practiced in the teams. The results are important as those verify in industrial setting what some agile books suggest: limiting workload and team empowerment has an impact on performance and stress. This contributes to our understanding how agile teams should be managed.