Improving agility and discipline of software development with the Scrum and CMMI

Abstract

This study presents a method of combining the Scrum methodology with the CMMI maturity model to improve both agility and discipline of software development. First, the authors propose the CMMI-Scrum reference model, which maps Scrum practices onto 123 practices of CMMI staged levels 2 and 3. For 60- of CMMI practices, which are insufficiently covered by Scrum they add new practices that improve discipline while maintaining agility. The practices to improve an actual software development process are selected from the reference model with the P-Sel algorithm based on answers to a questionnaire with 25 single-choice questions. They have applied our approach to processes of two IT companies, where on average 72- of the suggested practices were confirmed, 24.5- were mismatched and 3.5- were rejected.