TY - JOUR
T1 - Real world Scrum a Grounded Theory of variations in practice
AU - Masood, Zainab
AU - Hoda, Rashina
AU - Blincoe, Kelly
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 1976-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2022/5/1
Y1 - 2022/5/1
N2 - Scrum, the most popular agile method and project management framework, is widely reported to be used, adapted, misused, and abused in practice. However, not much is known about how Scrum actually works in practice, and critically, where, when, how and why it diverges from Scrum by the book. Through a Grounded Theory study involving semi-structured interviews of 45 participants from 30 companies and observations of five teams, we present our findings on how Scrum works in practice as compared to how it is presented in its formative books. We identify significant variations in these practices such as work breakdown, estimation, prioritization, assignment, the associated roles and artefacts, and discuss the underlying rationales driving the variations. Critically, we claim that not all variations are process misuse/abuse and propose a nuanced classification approach to understanding variations as standard, necessary, contextual, and clear deviations for successful Scrum use and adaptation.
AB - Scrum, the most popular agile method and project management framework, is widely reported to be used, adapted, misused, and abused in practice. However, not much is known about how Scrum actually works in practice, and critically, where, when, how and why it diverges from Scrum by the book. Through a Grounded Theory study involving semi-structured interviews of 45 participants from 30 companies and observations of five teams, we present our findings on how Scrum works in practice as compared to how it is presented in its formative books. We identify significant variations in these practices such as work breakdown, estimation, prioritization, assignment, the associated roles and artefacts, and discuss the underlying rationales driving the variations. Critically, we claim that not all variations are process misuse/abuse and propose a nuanced classification approach to understanding variations as standard, necessary, contextual, and clear deviations for successful Scrum use and adaptation.
KW - agile
KW - grounded theory
KW - Scrum
KW - scrum by the book
KW - scrum In practice
KW - variations
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85130851707&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TSE.2020.3025317
DO - 10.1109/TSE.2020.3025317
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85130851707
VL - 48
SP - 1579
EP - 1591
JO - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
JF - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
SN - 0098-5589
IS - 5
ER -