Conformance Checking of Scrum Practices: A Study of 10 Open-Source Projects

Abstract

Software development teams add agility to their processes by implementing agile practices and frameworks, the correct execution of which, creates artifacts and traces in the development environments. This wealth of information can be used to compare the actual practices against the practices defined by the frameworks and then, suggest potential improvements to the process. This thesis analyzed data taken from ten Jira repositories that belong to real life open-source projects. A set of Scrum rules is carefully extracted from official and relevant Scrum sources. In addition, several Scrum rules were proposed by the thesis. The goal of this thesis is to assess to what extent we can use data extracted from software development environments to verify the prescribed Scrum practices, through the aforementioned rules. Moreover, this thesis aims to apply rule-based conformance checking to the data, in order to verify the set of Scrum rules and check their compliance against the development team in a programmatic way. The results showed that the obtained data can only be mapped to nearly half of the defined Scrum practices and that, for the other half, there are not sufficient data captured by Jira. The results also indicated that some of the open-source projects are more compliant to the Scrum practices than the others, and that some Scrum practices themselves are more commonly adopted in the development teams than others. The thesis also highlights some limitations of the available data in issue-tracking software, which consequently conceal valuable information that can be used to improve team agility.