Stress level on global software projects using waterfall and scrum: A preliminary comparison

Software development involves different roles like those of business analysts, designers, developers, testers, auditors, project managers etc. In this paper, we focus on the role of the developers and auditors. Auditors have the responsibility to review the artifacts produced by the developers and the process used to deliver them. They also have to recommend corrective actions. We study the stress level of developers and auditors in the different phases of softwar development where teams followed either Waterfall or Scrum, and analyze how the quality of the produced software is affected by stress. This study has been conducted in 2012 as a part of annual global software development project that united undergraduate and graduate developers from the US, India and Senegal. We compared the stress level of teams following Waterfall with that of teams following Scrum. Our experiment shows that the stress level of developers using Waterfall tends to be higher than that of the developers using Scrum, and that the stress has a negative impact on the overall quality of the developed product.