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The competition in the software market demands that the time required for any software product to reach the market be reduced if the product is to survive competition from other developers. The pursuit of this goal has led to the adoption of agile software development methodologies. While other agile methodologies provide guidelines as to the software engineering (SE) practices to be used during the development lifecycle, Scrum does not. The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to identify the usage and level of importance of software engineering practices in the Scrum development environment; and second, to investigate how Scrum teams adopt an appropriate set of SE techniques and whether a hybrid Scrum/Extreme Programming (XP) methodology is an appropriate approach to take. This research was conducted by examining sample data from five organizations using the Scrum methodology. The sample included a range of industries including communications and embedded systems, financial asset management, software development houses and consulting firms in South Africa. The study employed a mixed method approach. A key finding was that, regardless of the fact that Scrum does not explicitly recommend engineering practices, there was extensive use of these practices by all of the participating organizations. The study also found that the lack of software engineering practices in Scrum does not constitute a barrier to a successful adoption of Scrum, provided the 'inspect and adapt' principle inherent in Scrum is properly followed. The study discusses the findings, explains the implications and suggests future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Starting from the documentation of high sprint velocity fluctuations in a Scrum project, this paper presents a thorough approach to identify the sources of issues arising in the context of Scrum implementation. Given that Scrum provides guidance on identifying process issues but not their root causes, various approaches are explored. This is of great relevance because Scrum defines project schedules relying heavily on sprint velocity and because it is the most widely used agile methodology. The findings provide a new approach to evaluate such fluctuations and establish a more realistic project assessment than what is currently defined by Scrum. In this respect, this paper contributes to improve the understanding of the software development process using this agile framework. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research attempts to identify how Agile systems development methodologies like SCRUM are affected by three behavioural issues - student syndrome, team member stress and organisational slack. The student syndrome applies when humans start tasks as late as possible and waste safety margins thus increasing time pressure and stress levels. Stress can be both good and bad in a project situation. Stress levels that exceed an optimum level result in decreased performance and eventual burnout, whereas stress levels that were below a minimum level result in decreased performance. Organizational slack is a measure of "busyness" and is relates to staff being 100% scheduled. This is viewed as a short-term strategy which can negatively affect longer-term change and reinvention. These three issues can affect project productivity and project outcomes. This research analyses how these three behavioral issues affect plan-based development approaches and agile approaches (specifically SCRUM) in terms of team productivity and project outcomes. This paper describes these behavioural issues and how they could affect a typical systems development project. Four research questions were derived to be used in the next phase of the research. This next phase will identify a suitable student project which will be completed by an undergraduate student team using a traditional project approach at the same time as a post-graduate project team using SCRUM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]