How Scrum Adds Value to Achieving Software Quality?

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

Better than you think? Exploring cost and schedule overruns in government IT projects

Information Technology (IT) projects experience cost and schedule overruns, and some fail altogether. We investigated 54 completed government IT projects, completed from 2011 – 2020. We present a mixed-method inquiry into Danish government IT projects. We used archival data to examine cost and schedule overruns in these projects, using measures established by Flyvbjerg. To further inform our understanding of the various drivers that influence these projects cost and schedule overrun, we conducted a qualitative study using interviews and documents analysis. Our findings show that projects in our sample experience much lower cost and schedule overruns than those reported in previous studies. Our qualitative analysis show that projects are more likely to be completed within time and schedule when project managers actively adopt a set of practices that help these projects to perform positively. These practices are: Building one team, accommodating uncertainty, rigorous project management and capitalizing previous domain knowledge

Spotlight on the Positives:How Do Information Technology Projects Achieve Cost Underruns?

The Information Technology (IT) project literature has extensively studied cost overrun. But there is surprisingly little work on cost underrun. In this paper, we explore twelve IT projects that achieved cost underrun, using interviews and documents analysis. Our findings show that projects achieve cost underruns when they actively implement practices to enhance process efficiency. These practices are: Implementing a collaborative environment, budgetary control, capitalizing on previous knowledge, continuous learning during the project, and accommodating uncertainty. Projects also encounter conditions that contribute directly to cost underrun, like scope reduction and savings in spending. Our key contribution lies in uncovering, based on a unique sample, how a set of specific practices can lead to cost underrun