We noticed that this increment in productivity was a consequence of the student s’ involvement in the planning, estimation and controlactivities in each sprint. This practice reinforced the commitment and the responsibility of each student and favored the leaders’ development, which also contributed to motivate the team.

they produced products which had very different functional sizes: from almost similar to that of a RUP product, to three times, or even seven times, bigger than that of a RUP product

Agile teams began to work in programing tasks no later than in the fifth week, but the RUP teams began to do so between the fifteenth and nineteenth week

the more people there were on a team, the more coordination problems they had

the personal attitude of a person in a certain situation may lead the other members to enhance some of their own personal characteristics, thus resulting in the whole group improving its behavior

evidence about obtaining higher productivity by using Agile methods

They found out that all the teams understood their assigned processes, but the RUP teams were more successful in applying the method. However, the RUP teams were significantly more likely to say that they would have preferred to use XP rather than their assigned process, which is exactly what was said by the students that participated in our empirical study.

they used a plan-driven process to compare the software qualityassurance processes and software defects of such project during a 17-month phase, which was then followed by a 20-month phase,

Another example of geographically distributed development using SCRUM was reported, but this time, a team of 4 persons did not get a significant productivity improvement, if compared to the previous phase of their project, in which a waterfall process had been applied

Nevertheless, we also found out that a later systematic review based on twenty eight very good papers [7] found evidence of the increase in productivity when using the SCRUM method.

constant testing provides a rapid feedback, thus making the early introduction of improvements possible.

software life cycle of their products may be described as waterfall or spiral, and the testing is most surely performed at the end of the cycle

systems are fully specified, they are predictable and they are built according to meticulous and extensive planning

Moreover,wefoundotheroutcomessuchasproductquality,clientsatisfaction,costreductionandteammotivation,whicharenotnecessarilyrelatedtoproductivitybutrepresentgeneralsuccesscharacteristicsinsoftwaredevelopment projects.

One of the core features of Scrum, and what makes it so potentially powerful, is the idea of iteration and improvement. This is in regards to both the product being worked on, and the efficiency of the team itself.

projects that were behind schedule and over budget

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