Scrumlity: An Agile Framework Based on Quality Assurance

Abstract

Agile is a methodology where continuous iterations and testing take place during the entire Software Development Life Cycle of a product. Scrum is one of many agile frame-works and is considered the most popular or widely adopted framework. Although Scrum presents several advantages such as incremental deliveries at the end of each sprint, stakeholders and product owners can change the requirements during the process and Scrum can adapt very quickly to these changes. Process and final product quality continue to be Scrum’s main challenges. Several authors have attempted to improve the quality of Scrum projects, changing some aspects of the framework such as including new quality practices, a quality role, as well as quality processes. However, the quantification of quality is still a challenge. This study suggests a change to Scrum including a quality role and some artifacts to evaluate quality before, during, and after each sprint. The proposed framework, called Scrumlity, was used for several weeks in real projects; Tests were conducted after each sprint to evaluate the acceptance rating for this new framework. Results obtained after this exercise indicate that there are several improvements to development phases and that developers generally accept the framework.