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Organizations have increasingly applied agile project management; however, they face challenges in scaling up this approach to large projects. Thus, this study investigates the key barriers and benefits of scaling agile methods to large projects. The research approach is a literature review, applying bibliometrics and content analysis with Bibliometrix and UCINET software. We conducted a sampling process in the Web of Science and Scopus databases and surveyed 76 articles in depth. The results identified 53 barriers clustered into six main categories: organizational issues, managerial issues, agile method-specific barriers, product/process issues, customer issues, and team issues. Thirty-two benefits were coded and clustered into three categories: business, project, and team. Requirement management appears as a core topic, impacting both barriers and benefits for scaling agile project management. We identified a strong relationship between the barriers and benefits. These results can be used to create questionnaires to explore these barriers and benefits in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scrum has become popular among the agile methodologies due to the substantial support that it provides to the project management teams. The scrum process delivers quick functionality in the form of sprints. Most of the quality assurance and quality control activities are skipped in scrum because of its short lifecycle and due to the absence of a dedicated quality assurance team. The development team pays more attention to delivery of products according to the customer satisfaction, and the parameters used for this type of assessment are the story success criteria and user acceptance testing. Only acceptance testing and integration testing are not sufficient to achieve a quality product. There is still a clamouring need felt to incorporate other quality control activities in scrum to achieve a quality product. In this work, we have made an attempt to implement the quality control activities in the scrum philosophy by introducing the concept of test backlog. The enhanced scrum model provides quality assessment methodology on the basis of frequency of remaining functional bugs. The concept of test backlog proposed in this study aims at implementing state of the art testing process in scrum. A case study was carried out to validate the model, which produced satisfactory results. Besides, we conducted a survey to access the state of the quality control in scrum. The proposed model and case study results are reported herein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use a case study of a project to create a Web 2.0-based, Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for researchers to share digital resources in order to reflect on the principles and practices for embedding eResearch applications within user communities. In particular, we focus on the software development methodologies and project management techniques adopted by the project team in order to ensure that the project remained responsive to changing user requirements without compromising their capacity to keep the project 'on track', i.e. meeting the goals declared in the project proposal within budget and on time. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we describe how the project team, whose members are distributed across multiple sites (and often mobile), exploit a repertoire of coordination mechanisms, communication modes and tools, artefacts and structuring devices as they seek to establish the orderly running of the project while following an agile, user-centred development approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the special theme: Project Management in e-Science: Challenges and Opportunities, we argue that the role of project management and different forms of leadership and facilitation can influence significantly the nature of cooperation and its outcomes and deserves further research attention. The quality of social interactions such as communication, cooperation, and coordination, have emerged as key factors in developing and deploying e-science infrastructures and applications supporting large-scale and distributed collaborative scientific research. If software is seen to embody the relational web within which it evolves, and if the processes of software design, development and deployment are seen as ongoing transformations of this dynamic web of relationships between technology, people and environment, the role of managers becomes crucial: it is their responsibility to balance and facilitate the dynamics of these relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]