The Relationship Between Scrum and Release Planning Activities: An Exploratory Case Study
In modern product software development settings, it becomes increasingly important to deal with rapid changes in scope, large numbers of users, and regular releases. These circumstances are ideal for an agile development method such as Scrum to prove its
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Abstract
In modern product software development settings, it becomes increasingly important to deal with rapid changes in scope, large numbers of users, and regular releases. These circumstances are ideal for an agile development method such as Scrum to prove its value. However, the implications that Scrum has on software product management (SPM) processes have not been investigated in detail. In this paper, we provide more insight into the link between release planning processes and Scrum, by performing a case study at a large Dutch social network provider. The results show an evolutionary approach to the implementation of Scrum, and the relation between several Scrum concepts and SPM capabilities. The findings presented in this paper contribute to more insight into the link between Scrum and SPM and can be of help to product software organizations that employ the Scrum development method.
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Introduction
In contrast to traditional software packages tailored to satisfy one specific customer, today’s software market shows a variety of product software packages that are aimed to serve an entire market with many customers (Regnell and Brinkkemper 2005). Because product software is released for an entire market instead of for just one customer, the development and management of product software is more complex. For example, while a customer-specific software package has to deal with a limited number of requirements coming from just one customer, product
M. Theuns • K. Vlaanderen (*) • S. Brinkkemper Utrecht University - Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht, the Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] A. Maedche et al. (eds.), Software for People, Management for Professionals, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-31371-4_14, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
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software has to deal with both an increasing amount of internal and external stakeholders (Ebert 2007), a large amount of requirements and often a much higher release frequency (Weerd et al. 2006). These circumstances form an ideal environment for agile software development methods. Agile software development methods such as DSDM (Stapleton 1997), Extreme Programming (Beck 1999) and Scrum (Schwaber 1995) enable software companies to dynamically respond to changes in both development environment and target environment (Schwaber 1995). The benefits of agile software development already gained a lot of attention in scientific literature (Dingsøyr et al. 2006; Fitzgerald et al. 2006; Mann and Maurer 2005) and even the applicability of agile principles to the domain of software product management (SPM) gained some attention recently (Vlaanderen et al. 2011), although more research should reveal its applicability to other areas as well (Maglyas et al. 2011). However, the effects or implications of the implementation of agile development methods for a company’s SPM processes haven’t been investigated in detail yet. In this paper, we describe the implementation of Scrum at a large Dutch onli
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