The Proposed Critical Factors to Improve the Performance of Scrum Teams

Scrum is one of the most popular and widely practiced agile software development methodologies. Scrum team consists of a Scrum Master, Product Owner, and developers. While using Scrum, several factors have been reported in the existing studies to improve or lower the performance of a Scrum team such as managing the priority of the product backlog items, role of an efficient product owner, cost and time to perform integration tests, accurate estimation of story points and code quality. This paper aims to determine critical factors those impact the most over the performance of the Scrum teams using a survey and systematic literature review. Furtherly, a model is proposed presenting the impact of critical factors to enhance the performance of Scrum teams to increase efficiency and work perfection, organizing and managing product backlogs, clarity in goals, execution of sprints in an estimated duration and increase productivity of product owner. The identified critical factors are validated using a survey and the results are found encouraging.