There is a lack of formal risk management techniques in agile software development methods Scrum. The need to manage risks in agile project management is also identified by various authors. Authors of this paper conducted a survey to find out the current practices in agile project management. Furthermore authors discuss the new integrated framework of Scrum and PRINCE2 with focus on risk management. Enrichment of Scrum with selected practices from the heavy-weight project management framework PRINCE2 promises better results in delivering software products especially in global development projects.
Agile development gets more appreciation from the market due to the flexible nature and more productivity. Among the Agile processes, Scrum gives better management of the processes, which are practiced in an organization. Though Scrum process model have several features and strengths but it still lacks in management and quality. This research deals with the improvement of Scrum processes for better management and to improve the quality of the software using the infusion of different practices from internationally renowned quality standards. Survey is used to validate the proposed framework. St…
Agile methods are receiving a growing interest from industry and these approaches are nowadays well accepted and deployed in software engineering. However, some issues remain to introduce agility in systems engineering. The objective of this paper is to show an agile management implementation in an educational project consisting in developing a connected mobile robot, and to evaluate the issues and benefits of adopting an agile approach. Among the most famous agile management methods, SCRUM has been chosen to lead this experiment. This paper first presents the project and how students traditio…
Scrum is an increasingly common approach to software development adopted by organizations around the world. However, as organizations transition from traditional plan-driven development to agile development with Scrum, the question arises as to which Scrum role (Product Owner, Scrum Master, or Scrum Team Member) corresponds to a Project Manager, or conversely which Scrum role should the Project Managers adopt? In an attempt to answer this question, we adopted a mixed-method research approach comprising a systematic literature review and embedded case study of a commercial software development …
The number of companies opting for remote working has been increasing over the years, and Agile methodologies, such as Scrum, were adapted to mitigate the challenges caused by the distributed teams. However, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed a fully working from home context, which has never existed before. This paper investigation a two-phased Multi-Method study. In the first phase, we uncover how working from home impacted Scrum practitioners through a qualitative survey. Then, in the second phase, we propose a theoretical model that we test and generalize using Partial Least Squares - Structura…
The Software Craftsmanship manifesto has defined values and principles that software development teams should follow to deliver quality software that fulfills functional and non-functional requirements without dealing with high amounts of technical debt. Software craftsmanship approach to software development prioritizes technical practices in order to provide a clean code base. This work analyzes a set of practices that can be applied to a Scrum project that aims to incorporate Software Craftsmanship values. The process implementation described may be a useful contribution for software develo…
Agile methods are best taught in a hands-on fashion in realistic projects. The main challenge in doing so is to assess whether students apply the methods correctly without requiring complete supervision throughout the entire project. This paper presents experiences from a classroom project where 38 students developed a single system using a scaled version of Scrum. Surveys helped us to identify which elements of Scrum correlated most with student satisfaction or posed the biggest challenges. These insights were augmented by a team of tutors, which accompanied main meetings throughout the proje…
Motivated and competent team members are a vital part of Agile Software development and make or break any project's success. Motivation is fostered by continuous progress and recognition of efforts. These concepts are founding pillars of the Scrum methodology, which focuses on self-organizing teams. The types of contributions Scrum development team members make to a project's progress are not only technical. However, a comprehensive model comprising the varied contributions in modern software engineering teams is not yet established. We propose a model that incorporates contributions of all Sc…
This paper presents a case study of Agile Scrum process followed in Retail Domain project. This paper also reveals the impacts of Cost of Software Quality, when agile scrum process is not followed efficiently. While analyzing the case study, the gaps were found and guidelines for process improvements were also suggested in this paper.
Agile techniques recently have received attention in developing safety-critical systems. However, a lack of empirical knowledge of performing safety assurance techniques in practice, especially safety analysis into agile development processes prevents further steps. In this article, we aim at investigating the feasibility and the effects of our S-Scrum development process, and stepwise improving and proposing an Optimized S-Scrum development process for safety-critical systems in a real environment. We conducted an exploratory case study in a one-year student project "Smart Home" at the Univer…
Communication in teams is an important but difficult issue. In a Scrum development process, we use the Daily Scrum meetings to inform others about important problems, news and events in the project. When persons are absent due to holiday, illness or travel, they miss relevant information because there is no document that protocols the content of these meetings. We present a concept and a Twitter-like tool that improves communication in a Scrum development process. We take advantage out of the observation that many people do not like to create documentation but they do like to share what they d…
Nowadays, the use of agile software development methods like Scrum is common in industry and academia. Considering the current attacking landscape, it is clear that developing secure software should be a main concern in all software development projects. In traditional software projects, security issues require detailed planning in an initial planning phase, typically resulting in a detailed security analysis (e.g., threat and risk analysis), a security architecture, and instructions for security implementation (e.g., specification of key sizes and cryptographic algorithms to use). Agile softw…
We describe advice derived from one of the largest development programs in Norway, where twelve Scrum teams combined agile practices with traditional project management. The Perform program delivered 12 releases over a four-year period, and finished on budget and on time. In this article, we summarize 12 key lessons on five crucial topics, relevant to other large development projects seeking to combine Scrum with traditional project management.
Agile Software Development (ASD) methodology has become widely used in the industry. Understanding the challenges facing software engineering students is important to designing effective training methods to equip students with proper skills required for effectively using the ASD techniques. Existing empirical research mostly focused on eXtreme Programming (XP) based ASD methodologies. There is a lack of empirical studies about Scrum-based ASD programming which has become the most popular agile methodology among industry practitioners. In this paper, we present empirical findings regarding the …
Agile models promote fast development. XP and Scrum are the most widely used agile models. This paper investigates the phases of XP and Scrum models in order to identify their potentials and drawbacks. XP model has certain drawbacks, such as not suitable for maintenance projects and poor performance for medium and large-scale development projects. Scrum model has certain limitations, such as lacked in engineering practices. Since, both XP and Scrum models contain good features and strengths but still there are improvement possibilities in these models. Majority of the software development comp…
Agile development methods are commonly used to iteratively develop the information systems and they can easily handle ever-changing business requirements. Scrum is one of the most popular agile software development frameworks. The popularity is caused by the simplified process framework and its focus on teamwork. The objective of Scrum is to deliver working software and demonstrate it to the customer faster and more frequent during the software development project. However the security requirements for the developing information systems have often a low priority. This requirements prioritizati…
While global software development (GSD) projects face cultural and time differences, the biggest challenge is communication. We studied a distributed student project with an industrial customer. The project lasted 3 months, involved 25 participants, and was distributed between the University of Victoria, Canada and Aalto University, Finland. We analyzed email communication, version control system (VCS) data, and surveys on satisfaction. Our aim was to find out whether reflecting on communication affected it, if standups influenced when developers committed to the VCS repository, and if leaders…
Motivation: How immature teams can become agile is a question that puzzles practitioners and researchers alike. Scrum is one method that supports agile working. Empirical research on the Scrum Master role remains scarce and reveals contradicting results. While the Scrum Master role is often centred on one person in rather immature teams, the role is expected to be shared among multiple members in mature teams. Objective: Therefore, we aim to understand how the Scrum Master role changes while the team matures. Method: We applied Grounded Theory and conducted qualitative interviews with 53 pract…
Agile software development methodologies focus on software projects which are behind schedule or highly likely to have a problematic development phase. In the last decade, Agile methods have transformed from cult techniques to mainstream methodologies. Scrum, an Agile software development method, has been widely adopted due to its adaptive nature. This paper presents a metric that measures the quality of the testing process in a Scrum process. As product quality and process quality correlate, improved test quality can ensure high quality products. Also, gaining experience from eight years of s…
Using university capstone courses to teach agile software development methodologies has become commonplace, as agile methods have gained support in professional software development. This usually means students are introduced to and work with the currently most popular agile methodology: Scrum. However, as the agile methods employed in the industry change and are adapted to different contexts, university courses must follow suit. A prime example of this is the Kanban method, which has recently gathered attention in the industry. In this paper, we describe a capstone course design, which adds t…
The most prominent Agile framework Scrum, is often criticized for its amount of meetings. These regular events are essential to the empirical inspect-and-adapt cycle proposed by Agile methods. Scrum meetings face several challenges, such as being perceived as boring, repetitive, or irrelevant, leading to decreased cooperation in teams and less successful projects. In an attempt to address these challenges, Agile practitioners have adopted teamwork, innovation, and design techniques geared towards improving collaboration. Additionally, they have developed their own activities to be used in Scru…
Linting tools automatically identify source code fragments that do not follow a set of predefined standards. Such feedback tools are equally desirable for "linting" agile development processes. However, providing concrete feedback on process conformance is a challenging task, due to the intentional lack of formal agile process models. In this paper, we present ScrumLint, a tool that tackles this issue by analyzing development artifacts. On the basis of experiences with an undergraduate agile software engineering course, we defined a collection of process metrics. These contain the core ideas o…
Purpose - The research aims to show the relevance of company client sponsored student projects in the University of Asia and the Pacific Information Technology (UA&P IT) Capstone Program through the use ofan Agile Methodology with Scrum Approach. Method - The modified program is employed on two batches with content analysis and survey results as benchmarks. Results - Surveys at the end of the sprints for both clients and students revealed that the length of the sprint was a critical factor in the development of the information system, and that students learned from addressing additional challe…
Companies implement different frameworks and best practices with the objective to improve the project management success rate and improve the business adaptability to the changing business environment. Project management framework (PRINCE2) and agile development framework (Scrum) proved in many cases that they can meet these objectives. However, both frameworks are based on different principles and the use of both frameworks together should be carefully considered. A large amount of money and effort has been invested by companies into establishing their project management environment and proce…
The Agile manifesto encourages us to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, while Scrum, the most adopted Agile development methodology, is essentially based on roles, events, artifacts, and the rules that bind them together (i.e., processes). Moreover, it is generally proclaimed that whenever a Scrum project does not succeed, the reason is because Scrum was not implemented correctly and not because Scrum may have its own flaws. This grants irrefutability to the methodology, discouraging deviations to fit the actual needs and peculiarities of the developers. In particular…
Developing sustainable software for the scientific community requires expertise in software engineering and domain science. This can be challenging due to the unique needs of scientific software, the insufficient resources for software engineering practices in the scientific community, and the complexity of developing for evolving scientific contexts. While open-source software can partially address these concerns, it can introduce complicating dependencies and delay development. These issues can be reduced if scientists and software developers collaborate. We present a case study wherein scie…
Context: Definition of Done (DoD) is one of the fundamental concepts of Scrum. It expresses a shared view of a Scrum Team on what makes an increment of their product complete. DoDs are often defined as checklists with items being requirements towards software (e.g., quality requirements) or towards activities performed to make the increment shippable (e.g., code reviews, testing). Unfortunately, the knowledge about the usefulness of DoD is still very limited. Objective: The goal is to study what benefits using the DoD practice can bring to an agile project, what problems it may trigger, and ho…
While organizations want to develop software products with reduced cost and flexible scope, stories about the applicability of agile practices to improve project development and performance in the software industry are scarce and focused on specific methodologies such as Scrum and XP. Given these facts, this paper aims to investigate, through practitioners' perceptions of value, which agile practices are being used to improve two performance criteria for software projects-cost and scope. Using a multivariate statistical technique known as Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), the results suggest …
Through our four years experiments on students' Scrum based agile software development (ASD) process, we have gained deep understanding into the human factors of agile methodology. We designed an agile project management tool - the HASE collaboration development platform to support more than 400 students self-organized into 80 teams to practice ASD. In this thesis, Based on our experiments, simulations and analysis, we contributed a series of solutions and insights in this researches, including 1) a Goal Net based method to enhance goal and requirement management for ASD process, 2) a novel Si…
The perceptions and attitudes of developers impact how software projects are run and which development practices are employed in development teams. Recent agile methodologies have taken this into account, focusing on collaboration and shared team culture. In this research, we investigate the perceptions of agile development practices and their usage in Scrum software development teams. Although perceptions collected through surveys of 42 participating students did not evolve significantly over time, our analyses show that the Scrum role significantly impacted participants' views of employed de…
This paper presents the types of teams that are currently in place at the Netherlands eScience Center. We categorize our teams into four different types: Project Teams, Collectives, Agile Teams and Scrum Teams. We provide a brief description of each team type and share stories from teams themselves to reflect on the strengths and shortcomings of each model. From our observation, we conclude that the type of team that is most suitable for each project depends on the specific needs of that project. More importantly, different types of teams are suitable for the different types of people working …
In seeking to complement consultants' and tool vendors' reports, there has been an increasing academic focus on understanding the adoption and use of software development methods and practices. We surveyed practitioners working in Brazil, Finland, and New Zealand in a transnational study to contribute to these efforts. Among our findings we observed that most of the 184 practitioners in our sample focused on a small portfolio of projects that were of short duration. In addition, Scrum and Kanban were used most; however, some practitioners also used conventional methods. Coding Standards, Simpl…
Management of project planning, monitoring, scheduling, estimation and risk management are critical issues faced by a project manager during development life cycle of software. In RUP, project management is considered as core discipline whose activities are carried in all phases during development of software products. On other side service monitoring is considered as best practice of SOA which leads to availability, auditing, debugging and tracing process. In this paper, authors define a strategy to incorporate the service monitoring of SOA into RUP to improve the artifacts of project managem…
Various project management approaches do not consider the impact that uncertainties have on the project. The identified threats by uncertainty in a projec day-to-day are real and immediate and the expectations in a project are often high. The project manager faces a dilemma: decisions must be made in the present about future situations which are inherently uncertain. The use of uncertainty management in project can be a determining factor for the project success. This paper presents a systematic review about uncertainties management in software projects and a guide is proposed based on the rev…
How risks are managed implicitly and explicitly at multiple levels of agile projects has not been extensively studied and there is a need to investigate how risk management can be used in large agile projects. This is the objective of this exploratory study which investigates the following research question: How does a large software/hardware development project using agile practices manage uncertainty at project/subproject and work package levels?
Project Management process plays a significant role in effective development of software projects. Key challenges in the project management process are the estimation of time, cost, defect count, and subsequently selection of apt developers. Therefore precise estimation of above stated factors decides the success level of a project. This paper provides an empirical study of several projects developed in a service oriented software company in order to comprehend the project management process. The analysis throws light on the existence of variation in the aforementioned factors between estimati…
Service Oriented Architecture A Revolution for Project Management Software has changed the way projects today are moving on the fly with the help of web services booming the industry. Service oriented architecture improves performance and the communication between the distributed and remote teams. Web Services to Provide Project Management software the visibility and control of the application development lifecycle-giving a better control over the entire development process, from the management stage through development. The goal of Service Oriented Architecture for Project Management Software…
This paper presents an architecture for the Project Management, which is defined using the concepts behind ServiceOriented and Decision Support System. The framework described, denominated as SoaDssPm, represents the following: a coherent solution to the problem of control Project Management the existing gap between the real execution of Project Management by describing the business process and relationships required by a SOA solution, and its objectives representation, in which the decisional aspects determine the final shape of the system, providing decision support to the identified busines…
Context: Software industry is continuously exploring better ways to develop applications. A new phenomenon to achieve this is Cloud based Global Software Development (CGSD), which refers to the adoption of cloud computing services by organizations to support global software development projects. The CGSD approach affects the strategic and operational aspects of the way projects are managed. Objective: The objective of the study is to identify the success factors which contribute to management of CGSD projects. Methods: We carried out a Multivocal Literature Review (MLR) to identify the success…
It is no secret that many projects fail, regardless of the business sector, software projects are notoriously disaster victims, not necessarily because of technological failure, but more often due to their uncertainties. The threats identified by uncertainty in day-to-day of a project are real and immediate and the stakes in a project are often high. This paper presents a systematic review about software project management uncertainties. It helps to identify the difficulties and the actions that can minimize the uncertainties effects in the projects and how managers and teams can prepare thems…
Complexity is an inherent attribute of any project. The purpose of defining and documenting complexity is to have an early warning tool allowing a project team to focus on certain areas and aspects of the project in order to prevent and alleviate future risks and issues caused by this complexity. The main contribution of this paper is to present a systematic view of complexity in project management by identifying its key attributes and classifying complexity by these attributes. A "complexity taxonomy", based on a survey of the existing complexity literature, is developed and discussed includi…
Software (SW) development is a very tough task which requires a skilled project leader for its success. If the project leader is not skilled enough then project may fail. In the real world of SW engineering 65% of the SW projects fail to meet their objectives as in [1]. The main reason is lack of training of the project mangers. This extreme ratio of failure can be reduced by teaching SW project management (SPM) to the future project managers in the practical manner, so that they may be skillful enough to handle the project in a better way. This paper intends to propose a model to be used to t…
Despite several scientific achievements in the last years, there are still a lot of IT projects that fail. Researchers found that one out of five IT-projects run out of time, budget or value. Major reasons for this failure are unexpected economic risk factors that emerge during the runtime of projects. In order to be able to identify emerging risks early and to counteract reasonably, financial methods for a continuous IT-project-steering are necessary, which as of today to the best of our knowledge are missing within scientific literature.
This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach of using software development artifacts to gauge student behavior and the effectiveness of changes to curriculum design. There is an ongoing need to adapt university courses to changing requirements and shifts in industry. As an educator it is therefore vital to have access to methods, with which to ascertain the effects of curriculum design changes. In this paper, we present our approach of analyzing software repositories in order to gauge student behavior during project work. We evaluate this approach in a case study of a university un…
The number of machine learning, artificial intelligence or data science related software engineering projects using Agile methodology is increasing. However, there are very few studies on how such projects work in practice. In this paper, we analyze project issues tracking data taken from Scrum (a popular tool for Agile) for several machine learning projects. We compare this data with corresponding data from non-machine learning projects, in an attempt to analyze how machine learning projects are executed differently from normal software engineering projects. On analysis, we find that machine …
Software development meets the various challenges of rapidly growing markets. To address such challenges projects to design and adopt specific development approaches. However, various project management approaches do not consider the uncertainties that exist in projects. In this paper, we present findings from a case study in which we explore how to apply the Management Uncertainty Software Project (MUPS) approach. We do so by the empirical investigation at a public organization in Brazil. The objective of this study is to contribute to the body of knowledge regarding the potential benefits of…
