Perception of Software Agile Methodology Understanding among IT practitioner in Malaysia’s IT Industry

Abstract

IT practitioners of different genders i.e. male and female found in the Malaysian IT industries. The research is conducted among IT Practitioners of male and female in Malaysian IT industries which focusses on variety of IT and Software companies in Malaysia. The study is conducted to investigate the level of understanding among both genders. The questionnaires were distributed and among eight software development companies or companies that consist of departments that actively engaged with the software development in Malaysia. There were four Malaysian companies and four Multinational companies based in Malaysia.  Prior to the distribution of the questionnaires, a pretest of survey was made on a small number of questionnaire forms.  There are total of 127 respondents in this research.

The respondents were selected based on the size of the paid-up capitals of the companies, i.e., from small to large companies with the maximum paid-up working capital of RM 5.5 Billion. Due to some technical and management conditions (less Agile practitioners in Malaysia), the number of respondents were selected by the non-probabilistic samplings and the identification of the companies was done manually. The stratified sample was then subjected to the non-probabilistic sampling method and the snowball sampling technique when needed.  The number of male staffs and officers were much higher than the female (71% and 29%, respectively with ?2=22.1 at p <0.0001. By considering if the above proportion were representative to the whole population of the software developers in Malaysia, thus it could be stated that more males than females   involved in the software development sectors that focus on the use of Agile in Malaysia. As indicated in the finding of this study, only 9% of the respondents understand Agile at the maximum scale of 10.  Similar percentage was for scale of 9. The percentages for scales 8, 7, and 6 were 24%, 21%, and 11%, respectively. The Female had shown the score of 6.56 out of 10 scale of understanding the agile, while male score of 6.87 of understanding the agile. However, the level of understanding  in Agile technique was still low as indicated by the  percentage and relative frequency of the IT practitioners or the mean level of scoring responded by the study subjects.  It was also shown that in relativity, the full understanding of Agile technique would lead into the production of high quality software.