Code Cooperation:

Can we remove employee deadline stress while enhancing company productivity?

...

Nothing is worse than a manager on your back. Conversely, nothing is worse than a
freeloading employee. Software companies often struggle to quantify a baseline whereby
managers and employees may negotiate an expected amount of code to produce for a given
timeframe. The Agile system’s popular “planning poker” allows team members to “bid” on how
long they believe a particular coding task will take. The average is calculated and the tasks are
distributed among team members. Unfortunately, these estimations are often inaccurate, and, as
inaccurate measurements are repetitively introduced into the development system, employee-
management tensions may arise as employees develop deadline stress and imposter syndrome
while management struggles to meet company requirements and plan efficient workflows.
Luckily, the introduction of Artificial Intelligence into Agile frameworks may provide a solution.

With recent initiatives of inclusivity in industry, it is important to recognize how project-

based work tends to be “highly conducive to work-related stress.” This has been demonstrated to
cause emotional exhaustion, role ambiguity, and role conflict, often affecting female project
workers even more than their male counterparts (Pfeiffer 2019, 21). In software, worker burnout
and stress typically come from several projects running simultaneously, unplanned tasks popping
up, and deficits of time and resources (Pfeiffer 2019, 21). Agile methods typically require
workers to fill multiple roles concurrently, since one individual may need to perform analytical,
design, coding, and testing tasks per iteration (Edberg 2012, 292). Additionally, because Agile
systems require a high degree of self-organization, they are particularly prone to coercive
behavior patterns among peers with hierarchical organizations (Pfeiffer 2019, 24).

Practically, conflict enters the system when employees are expecting to fulfill tasks
estimated at times much lower than their true completion time. Managers and employees may
not understand that “Implement a text input field” may be as simple as creating an input or as
complex as a program that utilizes text sanitization, other packages or libraries, unit testing, or
even something more sophisticated like Natural Language processing. Lower estimation
predictions paired with higher completion times are likely to cause managers to mistakenly
suspect poor work when, in fact, the confounding factor is just time.

The movement from “Waterfall Development” to “Agile Systems” in the 1970s and
1980s was based on the proposition that “free-wheeling” by team members is detrimental to
performance and that autonomy, despite its potential to increase the risk of “free-wheeling”, is
necessary for teams to respond to change (Maruping 2009, 378). However, despite these new
managerial strategies, an efficient metric for measuring whether team members are keeping up to
standards was not yet devised.
 Sprixl attempts to remedy the division between managerial expectation and employee
production. By automating the time-estimation process against an accurate dataset of precedents,
both employee and employer have a baseline for negotiation. Employees will feel vindicated to
show that their long-hours put into a project are perfectly reasonable given the context of the
problem and the average of similar, related tasks. Additionally, managers can rest assured
knowing their estimations for the workflow of the week will be accurate and reasonable. Sprixl
takes the personal guilt, stress, and risk out of task estimation by providing both parties with a
reasonable baseline.

Sprixl seeks to aid in company cooperation and inclusion through real, effective user-focused
programming and interfaces. Stress no more!

Sign up for Sprixl: https://sprixl.com/

Bibliography

Edberg, Dana, Polina Ivanova, and William Kuechler. 2012. “Methodology Mashups: An
Exploration of Processes Used to Maintain Software.” Journal of Management Information
Systems 28, no. 4: 271–303. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41713864.
Maruping, Likoebe M., Viswanath Venkatesh, and Ritu Agarwal. 2009. “A Control Theory
Perspective on Agile Methodology Use and Changing User Requirements.” Information Systems
Research 20, no. 3: 377–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23015471.

Pfeiffer, Sabine, Stefan Sauer and Tobias Ritter. 2019. Agile methods as stress management
tools? an empirical study. Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation. Vol. 13(2): 20-36. DOI:
10.13169/workorgalaboglob.13.2.0020