# Attitudes, Beliefs, and Development Data Concerning Agile Software Development Practices

## TL;DR

This study explores perceptions and actual usage of agile practices in Scrum teams, revealing that role influences attitudes and that certain practices like version control align closely with Agile values, with data analysis effectively identifying specific practices.

## Contribution

It provides new insights into how perceptions of agile practices relate to actual implementation and demonstrates data-driven methods to detect agile practices in development artifacts.

## Key findings

- Perceptions did not change significantly over time.
- Role significantly influenced views on practices.
- Data analysis can reliably identify agile practices.

## Abstract

The perceptions and attitudes of developers impact how software projects are run and which development practices are employed in development teams. Recent agile methodologies have taken this into account, focusing on collaboration and shared team culture. In this research, we investigate the perceptions of agile development practices and their usage in Scrum software development teams. Although perceptions collected through surveys of 42 participating students did not evolve significantly over time, our analyses show that the Scrum role significantly impacted participants' views of employed development practices. We find that using the version control system according to agile ideas was consistently rated most related to the values of the Agile Manifesto. Furthermore, we investigate how common software development artifacts can be used to gain insights into team behavior and present the development data measurements we employed. We show that we can reliably detect well-defined agile practices, such Test-Driven Development, in this data and that usage of these practices coincided with participants' self-assessments.