An Empirical Study of Transition and Adoption of the Scrum Framework in Legacy Products

Agile software development (ASD) methods attempt to foster agility as one dimension of the complex activity of delivering software solutions to gain business advantage in turbulent environments. It is however unknown whether such methods improve code delivery in software houses producing legacy mainframe software where the source code is not in an object-oriented programming language. In this paper, we evaluate whether there is any impact on the development process by the adoption of the Scrum framework, using a combination of quantitative and interpretive analysis on empirical data. We first test the significance of the code metrics committed by the developers before and after the transition and adoption. Using in-depth knowledge of the commercial project, we then interpret the results of statistical tests on the null hypothesis that the metrics show no significant change. The study has been conducted using real life empirical data gathered from the development of a sample commercial legacy product. 1 In a software development context, confusion can occur when referring to the term ‘agile’ (with a small ‘a’) and ‘Agile’ (with a capital ‘A’). In the interests of clarity, we use ‘agile’ as the dictionary definition of the term – ‘able to move quickly and easily; able to think and understand quickly’ http://oxforddictionaries.com; in contrast, ‘Agile’ (software development) refers to a specific set of processes, techniques and stances that have evolved and are underpinned by, the values of the non-profit organization, the Agile Alliance, http://www.agilealliance.com.