When Agile Means Staying: The Relationship between Agile Development Usage and Individual IT Professional Outcomes

The design of software development methodologies primarily focuses on improving processes including accommodating changing user requirements, accelerating product delivery and productivity. However, we know little about why and how modern development methodologies impact individual IT professional outcomes. Drawing on concepts from the agile development literature and job characteristics theory, we hypothesize a relationship between agile development usage and IT professionals' stay intention. We examine job satisfaction as mediating the effect of agile development usage on stay intention. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 18,755 software developers drawn from the 2018 Stack Overflow developer survey. We find a positive relationship between agile development usage and stay intention. Also, job satisfaction fully mediates the effect of agile development usage on stay intention. We discuss the implications our findings have on research and practice.