Mohammad Esteki, Taghi Javdani Gandomani, Hadi Khosravi Farsani
Abstract
The distributed Agile development approach has been accepted by software companies due to its benefits including lower cost and convenient software delivery time. However, due to the controversial nature of distributed and Agile development, significant challenges arise from spatial, temporal, social, and cultural differences between distributed teams. Agile development practices include collaboration, face-to-face communication, self-organizing teams, retrospectives, etc., in the distributed model become more challenging. Scrum, as the most popular Agile methodology, assumes that team members work together in the same room. But this principle does not apply in a realistic scenario where Agile teams are distributed in different locations. Hence, there are important risks that need to be addressed in order to succeed in the project. The need for a comprehensive framework that can be used to identify potential risks, evaluation and control, is felt. The purpose of this research was to propose a risk management framework in Scrum using the PRINCE2 methodology, which includes the perceived risks in distributed Scrum projects and their causes and roots for managing these risks. By embedding Scrum distributed in the delivery layer of PRINCE2 methodology and placing perceived risk factors from distributed Scrum, along with a hybrid model, a risk management framework has been suggested. This framework has been used in a case study, and the results showed its proper functioning in detecting and eliminating potential risks in the case under study. Also, using this framework has led to increasing team efficiency in terms of increasing the number of completed user stories in each sprint.