Factors Impacting on Customer Satisfaction by Scrum

Factors impacting on customer satisfaction by Scrum

Prasanna D. Samarasinghe - 159130P                     _________________________                _

CS6281- Business Research Report - Portfolio Project, University of Moratuwa, MBA in Information Technology, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, 2015

1. Abstract

Agile methodologies were highly absorbed in the recent past by software project management as successful practices of the software development life cycle (SDLC). It has evolved throughout last decade and many frameworks have been built on top of agile. Scrum is an agile framework to guide and manage complex projects towards a successful completion. There are enough studies that have been published analyzing agile methods. However, there are very few scholarly articles on customer perspective of the agile or scrum approach. There previously have been a few published arguments to either prove or disprove this assertion. The ultimate purpose of this paper is to review past studies in order to find the factors of customer satisfaction by Scrum approach for software developments. After investigating the main questions and the hypothesis, the results indicated that scrum adoption has highly contributed to achieve better customer satisfaction and increase the success rate of the software projects.

1. Introduction

Agile methods are becoming more popular and have gained more interest in the Software development Industry at present. A recently conducted survey indicated that more than 14% of the United States’ and the Europe’s software development companies are using agile methods in their software development life cycle, and 49% of the companies are interested in agile methodologies and are willing to adopt the procedures soon (Cardozo, Neto, 2010). Agile methods have been increasingly adopted since 2001 to overcome the difficulties of software development and to achieve better success rate in completion. Researchers have found that the success rate of traditional waterfall method is 14% while the agile method is 42% (Cartaxo, Araujo, 2013).

Another reason to move in to agile approaches is the time and the cost of software projects. Most software development companies use agile frameworks to complete their projects at minimal cost during a short period of time. Agile methodologies are increasingly embraced for the reason of software projects nowadays are becoming progressively complex and difficult to handle since customer requirements are changing consistently. (Mahalakshmi, Sundararajan, 2013). Agile practices will help to plan and manage software development in a more organized, faster and cheaper manner than traditional software developments. The main difference between agile software developments and traditional approach is that agile methods offer comfortable mechanisms for change management instead of considering strict plan-based control and for up-front plans within the SDLC (Rao, Naidu, 2011). This will help to deliver the customer’s requirement within less time and cost.