Assessing Job Satisfaction of Software Engineers Using GQM Approach

Abstract

In this study, the Goals Questions Metrics (GQM) approach was utilized to analyze the relationship between lifestyle and software process-oriented factors and the job satisfaction level of Software Engineers. The author organized the questionnaire that included questions addressing all the metrics identified during GQM activities. Gathered metrics are analyzed on being correlated with workplace contentment of survived developers. The author found ten statistically significant factors on a confidence interval of 95%. Those are age, deadline pressure, personality, an average number of lines of code contributed to a project weekly, relationships with peer colleagues and management, an intensity of interaction with customers, sleep duration, quality of working environment, and prevalence of agile methods in the development process in a company. However, a number of factors, that are generally believed to influence job satisfaction, were found to be insignificant. Overtime working, project criticality were demonstrated to have no considerable effect on job satisfaction. Multivariate regression was employed to build the model to recognize what metrics are the most important to assess workplace contentment. The author shows that depending on included factors it is possible to achieve R-square of 59–89%.