The Effects of Student Syndrome, Stress, and Slack on Information Systems Development Projects

Abstract

This research attempts to identify how Agile systems development methodologies like SCRUM are affected by three behavioural issues - student syndrome, team member stress and organisa- tional slack. The student syndrome applies when humans start tasks as late as possible and waste safety margins thus increasing time pressure and stress levels. Stress can be both good and bad in a project situation. Stress levels that exceed an optimum level result in decreased performance and eventual burnout, whereas stress levels that were below a minimum level result in decreased performance. Organizational slack is a measure of “busyness” and is relates to staff being 100% scheduled. This is viewed as a short-term strategy which can negatively affect longer-term change and reinvention. These three issues can affect project productivity and project outcomes. This research analyses how these three behavioral issues affect plan-based development approaches and agile ap- proaches (specifically SCRUM) in terms of team productivity and project outcomes. This paper describes these behavioural issues and how they could affect a typical systems devel- opment project. Four research questions were derived to be used in the next phase of the research. This next phase will identify a suitable student project which will be completed by an under- graduate student team using a traditional project approach at the same time as a post-graduate project team using SCRUM.