Improving the software development process in a software development team - A case study

Abstract

Changes in the context in which software engineering practices are carried out also initiate the need to change in the practices to effectively work as a development team while delivering the software product with the highest possible values. While the thesis was initiated to improve the continuous integration and delivery practices in the case company, the context and the need for the changes in the practices highlighted the need for enhancing the Scrum practices within the software development team. With the design science research methodology approach, the problems in the software development team were drawn during the current state analysis phase followed by a workshop to discuss the findings and select the challenges to tackle as part of the thesis work - both from the case company and development team members’ perspective. The results from the current state analysis highlight five core problem areas from which problem area ’Process and Tools’ was selected for solving in this project after the discussion with the development team. Despite already utilizing some practices of Scrum, the development team decided to evolve the Scrum adoption with the utmost goal of solving concrete problems in the problem area captured during the current state analysis phase. Semi-structured interviews and surveys were utilized to collect the data, and the findings reveal the potential of the process while suggesting further improvements. Scrum is easier to understand but challenging to master. The process exposes the potential, offers the possibility to respond to the challenges in an agile way while emphasizing the importance of context in shaping the practices and tools which is utilized for software construction.