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Empirical Software Engineering

Erschienen in:

01.12.2022

How Scrum adds value to achieving software quality?

verfasst von: Adam Alami, Oliver Krancher

Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering | Ausgabe 7/2022

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Abstract

Scrum remains the most popular agile software development method implementation for a variety of reasons; one important motive is to improve software quality. Yet many organizations fail to achieve quality improvements through the use of Scrum, and existing research sheds little light on the value-add of Scrum for software quality. More specifically, (1) how notions of software quality among Scrum practitioners relate to established quality perspectives, (2) how Scrum helps teams to achieve higher software quality and (3) why some teams fail to meet the objective of higher quality. We addressed these gaps through a two-phased qualitative study based on 39 interviews and two in-depth case studies. We find that Scrum practitioners emphasize established notions of external quality comprising of conformity to business needs and absence of defects, while they also value internal quality, especially sustainable software design. Our results show that Scrum helps teams achieve both dimensions of quality by promoting some social antecedents (collaboration, psychological safety, accountability, transparency) and process-induced advantages (iterative development, formal inspection, and adaptation). Our findings unveil how these factors contribute to achieving software quality and under what conditions their effects can fail to materialize. These conditions include inconsistent Scrum implementations, cultural constraints, team tensions, and inaccessibility of end-users. In addition, the complexity of the project aggravates the impact of these conditions. Taken together, these findings show that Scrum can complement established quality assurance and software engineering practices by promoting a social environment that is conducive to creating high-quality software. Based on our findings, we provide specific recommendations for how practitioners can create such an environment.

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All Phase 1 participants agree for their anonymized interviews to be made available part to the study report.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6624063

The agreements entered by the first author with both Phase 2 companies prevent us from making Phase 2 data and analysis available.

An agreement with both cases was reached to engage, record and use informal conversations with team members. Kolkata communicated this agreement to the team via email and Phoenix in an introduction meeting of the researcher to the team. At the start of each informal conversation, the researcher made the participant aware of the recording of the conversation and her right to object to participation and/or recording. The researcher also read a brief statement of how the conversation data shall be used in the research process.

https://www.atlassian.com/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/

The researcher continued to have access to the projects artifacts (e.g., Jira and Azure Boards) which has been agreed with both companies, to remain updated with the project progress until the closure of the projects. The agreements with both cases also covered continuous access to team members for occasional informal conversations until the end of the projects. Even though, the observations ceased in January 2021, the first author had frequent contact with the companies through the point of contacts for projects’ updates.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6624063

The count of the number of Sprints does not reflect the calendar dates. This due to holidays and delays experienced by the team. For example, some Sprints were extended by a week or more to conduct what the team called “bugs cleaning”, a period dedicated to resolving outstanding defects in order to reduce the defect ratio.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6624063

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Titel: How Scrum adds value to achieving software quality?
verfasst von: Adam Alami
Oliver Krancher
Publikationsdatum: 01.12.2022
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering / Ausgabe 7/2022
Print ISSN: 1382-3256
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7616
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-022-10208-4

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