A Comprehensive Study on State of Scrum Development

International Conference on Computing, Communication and Automation (ICCCA2016)

ISBN: 978-1-5090-1666-2/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE 867

A Comprehensive Study on State of Scrum

Development

Shruti Sharma

Amity University,Uttar Pradesh

Noida, India

[email protected]

Nitasha Hasteer

Amity University,Uttar Pradesh

Noida, India

[email protected]

Abstract— The software industry has moved from the

traditional software development to the agile software development

model. Under this umbrella there are many methodologies which

are Scrum, Extreme Programming, Crystal, FDD (Feature-driven

development), DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method),

etc. This paper investigates about the current state of Scrum, its

popularity and its evolution in the recent five years. We have taken

into consideration the published literature and industrial survey.

Our result reveals that among various agile methodologies, Scrum

is a popular software development methodology used by industries

and it is also the area of interest for the research community.

(Abstract)

Keywords— Agile software development; Traditional software

models; Agile methodologies; Scrum Framework (key words)

I. INTRODUCTION Agile, in the world of software development industry have

emerged out to be a beneficial development technique which help the organizations to complete their projects fast. It is capable to overcome the limitations of the traditional software development approaches in terms of providing easy and better implementations, better customer satisfaction and their involvement, faster delivery rate of the product, easily adaptable to new changing environment and so on. Today, it has become so popular that every software industry is trying to adopt this approach in their organization in order to get maximum benefits. There are several agile methods which are being used by many development industries namely Scrum, Extreme programming (XP), Feature-driven development (FDD), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Agile modeling, Agile Unified Process (AUP) and many more. Our focus of study is Scrum methodology. It is a framework which is best suited for the projects with the changing requirements and gets the feedback from the customers. Extreme programming is one of the adaptive agile methodologies which emphasizes on team work in order to get efficient and effective software products. It focuses on business values with the customer involvement. The extreme programmers work in pair or group keeping their design simple and clean. The Feature-driven development is a practical model for object oriented software engineering. It is a client-centric approach. It is highly recognized due to its short iterations, frequent delivery, simple to understand and better review. Dynamic Systems Development Method is

robust delivery framework that is capable to deliver the right solution at the right time. It focuses on early delivery from the perspective of business benefits. Agile modeling is a practice based methodology which is a collection of values, principles and practices for effective modeling and documentation. Agile Unified Process is similar to the rational unified process which is simple to understand and deliver its software at the end of each iteration. It focuses on high value activities.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how Scrum has evolved and what is its acceptance percentage. The rest of the paper is organized in the sections as follows: Section II shows how the traditional approach is different from agile approach in the software development industry. Section III describes about the Scrum methodology and its framework. Section IV illustrates the Methodology used. Section V is Review and Analysis. Section VI presents the conclusion.

II. TRADITIONAL VS AGILE

Today, Agile is a buzzword in the software development industry which is based on an iterative and incremental software development. It is paradigm introduced in the software industry that defines itself differently from the other traditional software development modeling techniques as it works on the work break-down structure technique. It is value driven technique which focuses on customer involvement with their needs, customer satisfaction, team work, easy adaptation to changes in software, flexibility, faster delivery of working product over documentation, feedback and inspection. The traditional model fails to have all these aspects as it follows up the fixed and sequential plan made at the starting phase, linear development, emphasizes on documentation ,rigid to any new changes, customer involvement is very less, slow and a time consuming process.


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Fig. 1. Traditional development versus Agile development

III. SCRUM FRAMEWORK

Scrum is a light-weight framework which is simple to understand and capable to manage complex product development with some deadline. This framework consists of Scrum team, their associated activities, artifacts and rules. Scrum team consists of a product owner, Scrum master and development team. In Scrum, the software product is delivered in the series of iteration or increments within a predefined time-box (typically 30 days) called sprint [1].

The product owner has the responsibility to formulate the plan according to the problem and dividing them among the development team in such a manner to get better functionality and results [2]. The Scrum master plays a vital role as the Scrum master is a person who leads the development team and keeps an eye on them, guide them, help them, resolves issues, make necessary improvements etc. It acts as the bridge of communication between the product owner and development team. The Scrum master also conduct the daily meeting in order to get the status of the project [3]. The development team is the group of highly qualified members (typically 5-9 members) who help in achieving the goals of the project and releasing product at the end of each sprint [4].

Scrum process flow starts with the vision that product owner has regarding the product that he wants to create and on that basis a prioritized list is made containing product features called product backlog. Then a sprint starts with the sprint planning and sprint backlog which includes the tasks to be done by team. In sprint planning, the team makes the decision of choosing a task from the product backlog which they believe that they can complete it within a sprint cycle. Then come sprint backlog in which task is broken down into units that is carried forward by the team who determines the best way to accomplish the goal within each sprint cycle. Daily Scrum meetings (typically 15 minutes) are also organized so that we get the direction of our project as well as its progress.

At the end of each sprint cycle there is sprint review in which the product is well inspected by all the stakeholders including customers, Scrum team and all associated members. They visualize the product and give feedback. Then comes sprint retrospective which is followed by the sprint review. Sprint retrospective is done before next sprint planning in which the scrum team is involved that focus on further improvements in order to get better results in the next sprint phase [1] [4].

Fig. 2. Scrum Framework

IV. METHODOLOGY

In order to get a thorough perspective of the current trends, research and adoption for Scrum framework, we followed a systematic approach to collect the relevant data.

In this methodology the following tools were used:

A. Industrial surveys

There are many organizations that are publishing Industrial surveys and reports. For our study, we have used the VersionOne in ‘State of Agile Survey’ [5-10]. Studying these reports from the year 2010-2014, we were able to compare Scrum with other methodologies on the basis of their adoption in the industries over the period.

B. Relevant Literarture Published

There is enough relevant published literature available to form a thorough understanding on the current state of Scrum in today’s scenario. For our study, we considered 30 relevant papers. We have used the two search repositories namely IEEE and ACM. The detailed statistics of the year wise studies is illustrated in Table I below.

TABLE I. RELEVANT PUBLISHED STUDIES

DIGITAL

LIBRARY

2

01

5

2

01

4

2

01

3

2

01

2

2

01

1

2

01

0

T

ota

l

IEEE 8 5 4 - 4 - 21

ACM 3 1 - 4 - 1 9

Total 11 6 4 4 4 1 30


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C. Study Focus Area

We have categorized the published literature on the basis of the focused areas of the study.

Search Keywords

The search keywords uses in this review for scrum are:

TABLE II. SEARCH KEYWORDS

Keywords Synonyms

SCRUM

Scrum Software Development

Scrum framework implementation

Scrum adoption

V. REVIEW AND ANALYSIS

A. Based on Survey

The survey conducted by the organization VersionOne in ‘State of Agile Survey’ gives the clear picture of scrum in industries. No doubt today agile has become very popular and has been adopted by many development industries. According to recent year’s reports from 2010 - 2014, as the results of the 2015 survey has not been out yet, we can see that how Scrum methodology has become very popular leaving other agile methodologies behind. Figure.3 shows the comparison of adopting agile methodologies by industries over the span of five years (in percentage).

Fig. 3. Scrum popularity

From figure 3 we can clearly see that how Scrum has been adopted by most of the industries while the other methodologies like XP, agile unified process, feature driven development, scrum/XP hybrid, DSDM, agile modeling techniques are relatively less adopted.

According to the 5th annual state of agile survey 2010(11th Aug - 31st Oct, 2010), the most widely used agile methodology was Scrum (58%) while others methodologies that have been used by industries was only 25% [5]. In 6th

annual state of agile survey 2011(22nd July- 1st Nov, 2011), 52% software developer use Scrum while other methods decrease by 4% i.e to become 21% [6]. In 7th annual state of agile survey 2012(9th Aug - 1st Nov, 2012), this report shows 54% Scrum users in industry whereas others remain at 18% only [7]. Likewise in 8th annual state of agile survey 2013(4th Aug - 16th Oct, 2013), the Scrum users increased to 55% while others decreased to 17% [8]. Now according to the latest 9th annual state of agile survey 2014(July - Oct, 2014), it is shown that Scrum methodology got increased to 56% while other methodologies remain at 12% only [9]. Through these surveys we can conclude that as the survey goes further, there is a continuous decrease in the trend of other agile methodologies while the use of Scrum increases every next year by the development industries

B. Based on Relevant Literature

We have observed that scrum has taken its position not only in the current development industries but also in the field of research work. Many researchers and practitioners are investigating about the practices of agile methodologies in the current scenario resulting in the increase trend of publishing articles or papers in this field. Figure 4 shows the number of studies in the field of Scrum methodology over the last six years.

Research studies of scrum

According to the figure 4.From 30 total relevant studies ,in 2010 we have only 3% of studies which got increased in 2011, 2012, 2013 by 10%, in 2014 there is a gradual rise by 7% becoming 20% and in 2015,we have maximum number of studies which is 36% at the total.

Now we have classified our study on the basis of abstract and conclusion of the paper to give the simple overview of work done by various researchers under the Scrum. This is illustrated in the Table III.


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TABLE III. STUDIES UNDER SCRUM METHODOLOGY

YEAR AUTHORS WORK

2015

Ashish Kumar

Sultania [12]

Developing Test

Automation Software

Based on Agile

Methodology.

Alan Braz, et al. [13] Comparing efficiency of

new process with plain

Scrum for developing

better quality software.

Breno Lisi Romano

et al. [14]

Use of Scrum within small

business enterprise.

AlanR. Santos et al.

[15]

An empirical study of

applying CBL and Scrum

in a

mobile application

development

Course.

Meryem Elallaoui at

al. [32]

An algorithm for the

transformation of user

stories

Into sequence diagrams in

the Scrum process.

Daniel Pauly [33] Adoption of Scrum

principles in e-commerce.

Glaydson Luiz

Bertoze Lima et al.

[34]

Adaptations of Scrum

practices to Integrate the

development of Co-based

hardware design with the

software.

Violetta J. Wawryk et

al. [35]

Critical changes

influencing

Distributed Scrum team.

Ivana Bosni´c et al.

[36]

Introducing Scrum into a

Distributed Course.

Erica Weilemann

[37]

Impact of Females in Agile

Software Development

Teams

Abdul Rauf et al. [38] Comprehensive review of

the Agile practices in

projects.

2014

Ž. Požgaj et al. [10] Implementing Scrum in

teaching model.

Quan Wei et al. [16] An approach of combining

the Scrum methodology

with the UML modelling

methods.

Julian M. Bass [17] Activities of Scrum Master

in Large Enterprise

Projects.

Georgia M Kapitsaki

et al. [18]

Instructive view into the

Scrum development.

Markus Hummel [19] To identify general state of

research on agile.

Anupriya Tuli et al.

[20]

The significant roles of

Agile methodologies.

Veli-Pekka Eloranta

et al. [21]

To identify broken core

principles of Scrum in

industry.

De Tran-Cao et al.

[11]

Systematic

Reviewing the current

research literature on the

2013 basis of effort estimation in

Agile software projects.

Amani Mahdi

Mohammed Hamed

et al. [22]

Review and Analysis of

Popular Agile Approaches

in Software Development.

Michele Gannon [4] Implementing

fundamentals of scrum

methodology on a project.

2012

Maria Paasivaara et

al. [23]

Implementing Scrum on

distributed scrum projects.

Christelle Scharff et

al. [24]

To elicits the difficulties

encountered by the

Students new to Scrum.

Charles Wallace et al.

[25]

Scrum in the curriculum of

computer science and

software engineering.

Sune Wolff [26] Use of formal specification

techniques in agile

management process

2011

Eva del Nuevo et al.

[27]

Integration of RUP and

Scrum in distributed

environment

Hu Guang-yong [28] Implementing Scrum

development in Vehicle

spare

parts management system

Eduardo J. Quaglia et

al. [29]

Improving project

management performance

using Scrum.

Tomohiro Hayata et

al. [2]

To propose a hybrid model

to

apply Scrum into the

traditional software

development process

2010 Christelle Scharff et

al. [30]

To evaluate the use of

Scrum in mobile

application development.

C. Based on the focus areas of study

We have categorized our study on the basis of focused area in scrum. This gives the idea about the type of work that has been done and the focus area of the study as shown in Table IV [31].

TABLE IV. CATEGORIZATION OF SCRUM BASED STUDIES

Study Focus No. of

Papers

References

Review & Analysis Papers 5 [11], [18], [19], [22], [38]

Proposed Model/ New

implementation of Model

using Scrum

15 [2], [4], [12], [13], [16], [20],

[26], [28], [29], [30], [32], [33],

[34], [35], [37]

Implementing Teaching

Model on Scrum

3 [10], [25], [36]

Implementing Scrum on

Distributed Teams

4 [14], [17], [23], [27]

Challenges/Difficulties of

scrum

3 [15], [21], [24]


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VI. CONCLUSION

We investigated the Scrum methodology on the basis of relevant literature, adoption and popularity. Every year there is an increasing trend of Scrum adoption in software development industries as well as in research areas. Our work reveals the current trend of study areas of Scrum as we have found that the implementation of Scrum in existing models has the highest number of studies compared to others. This could be helpful for the upcoming researchers and practitioners. We have not focused more on the models because there is already a lot of work that has been done. We conclude that Scrum methodology is widely used technique as compared to the other agile methodologies.

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A Comprehensive Study on State of Scrum Development

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