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An empirical study on the relationship between the use of agile practices and the success of Scrum projects

Published: 16 September 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In this article, factors considered critical for the success of projects managed using Scrum are correlated to the results of software projects in industry. Using a set of 25 factors compiled in by other researchers, a cross section survey was conducted to evaluate the presence or application of these factors in 11 software projects that used Scrum in 9 different software companies located in Recife-PE, Brazil. The questionnaire was applied to 65 developers and Scrum Masters, representing 75% (65/86) of the professionals that have participated in the projects. The result was correlated with the level of success achieved by the projects, measured by the subjective perception of the project participant, using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. The main finding is that only 32% (8/25) of the factors correlated positively with project success, raising the question of whether the factors hypothesized in the literature as being critical to the success of agile software projects indeed have an effect on project success. Given the limitations regarding the generalization of this result, other forms of empirical results, in particular case-studies, are needed to test this question.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ESEM '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
    September 2010
    423 pages
    ISBN:9781450300391
    DOI:10.1145/1852786
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    Published: 16 September 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. Scrum
    2. agile practices
    3. empirical study
    4. project success
    5. survey

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    View all
    • (2024)Perceived impact of agile principlesInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107552176:COnline publication date: 1-Dec-2024
    • (2023) The affective, behavioural and cognitive outcomes of agile project management: A preliminary meta‐analysis Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology10.1111/joop.1242996:3(678-706)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2023
    • (2020)Derivation of an Agile Method Construction Set to Optimize the Software Development ProcessJournal of Cases on Information Technology10.4018/JCIT.202007010222:3(19-34)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2020
    • (2018)Do Usability and Agility Combine?Proceedings of the 17th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3274192.3274210(1-11)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2018
    • (2015)How product owner teams scale agile methods to large distributed enterprisesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-014-9322-z20:6(1525-1557)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2015
    • (2014)An empirical investigation of the factors affecting agile usageProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/2601248.2601253(1-10)Online publication date: 13-May-2014
    • (2014)Do XP customer-developer interactions impact motivation? findings from an industrial case studyProceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/2593702.2593718(79-86)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2014
    • (2013)The Impact of Scrum on Customer SatisfactionProceedings of the 2013 27th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1109/SBES.2013.10(129-136)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2013
    • (2013)Experiences by using AFFINE for building collaborative applications for online communitiesProceedings of the 5th international conference on Online Communities and Social Computing10.1007/978-3-642-39371-6_39(345-354)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2013
    • (2013)Agile software development with open source software in a hospital environmentProceedings of the 13th international conference on Web Engineering10.1007/978-3-642-39200-9_37(439-451)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2013

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