Scrum is the most adopted Agile methodology.The research conducted on Scrum adoption is mainly qualitative and there is therefore a need for a quantitative study on Scrum adoption challenges.The primary objective of this paper is to present the findings of a study on the factors that have a significant relationship with Scrum adoption as perceived by Scrum practitioners working within South African organizations.Towards this objective, a narrative review to extract and synthesize the existing challenges was conducted.These synthesized challenges were used in the development of a conceptual framework for evaluating the challenges that have a correlation and linear relationship with Scrum adoption.Following this, a survey questionnaire was used to test and evaluate the factors forming part of the developed framework.The findings indicate that Relative Advantage, Complexity, and Sprint Management are factors that have a significant linear relationship with Scrum adoption.Our recommendation is that organizations consider these findings during their adoption phase of Scrum.

Scrum has been the most widely adopted Agile methodology over the past decade with Scrum and Scrum variants offering alternatives to the old software development methods.While Scrum plays an important role in the success of Agile development, it does come with its own challenges.In previous research challenges have been analyzed at the organizational and team level, primarily via case studies.However, fundamentally, Scrum needs to be adopted at the individual level.Furthermore, challenges such as inexperience, poor communication, specialization, lack of teamwork, low-quality, organizational culture and Scrum compatibility, have been identified as contributors.This paper therefore discusses the Scrum and Agile adoption challenges faced both globally as well as within the South African borders, from the findings of a narrative review.Secondly, a custom model adapted from the Diffusion of Innovation theoretical model was developed to detect the Scrum adoption challenges experienced within software organizations at the individual level.The custom model referred to as the Scrum Adoption Challenges Detection Model (SACDM) consists of four constructs, namely; individual factors, team factors, organizational factors and technology factors.The constructs are composed of nineteen independent variables that assists in understanding which factors contributes towards an individual either adopting or rejecting Scrum within a software organization.SACDM is therefore used to detect the adoption or rejection of Scrum as the dependent variable based on the independent variables being tested within the four constructs.The model can further be used with a survey questionnaire to provide generalized awareness of Scrum adoption challenges allowing software organizations to make more informed decisions when adopting Scrum.Future research is to allow the model to contribute towards Scrum adoption challenges predictive analysis.

The emergence of cloud computing is influencing how businesses develop, re-engineer, and implement critical software applications. The cloud requires developers to elevate the importance of compliance with security policies, regulations and internal engineering standards in their software development life cycles. Cloud computing and agile development methodologies are new technologies that have come with new approaches in the way computing services are provisioned and development of quality software respectively. However, the synergy between the two is bonded with technical and non-technical challenges. In this paper, a conceptual framework is proposed to support the process of migration of South African small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) who are using agile software development methodologies to cloud computing environment.

Agile methodologies have been in the software development scene for more than five years and this has resulted in the proliferation of a number of approaches to this new way of developing software. The initial agile problems were mainly focused on the definition of what agile methodologies are all about and empirical evidence of their successful application. Today one of the most formidable challenges is selecting appropriate agile processes for a given project and the next problem that some practitioners are already faced with is agile certification. This paper presents a selection tool that picks the agile practices relevant to a given environment. The activities that relate to each practice are used to classify the practices into either technical or social. The authors believe that all practices can be classified into technical and social oriented activities. The technical practices are those that relate to design coding and testing and the social practices relate to people issues. The practices are analyzed to this detail in order to simplify the tailoring process. In this case the environment is then viewed from the perspective of technical and social issues and it becomes easier to identify possible things that could be done to tailor the agile practices. The tool is a simple application that can be used with other project planning tools on any PC. This is part of further work based on one of the authors' PhD work. The additions include the development of a computer program to implement the tool.

Agile software development methodologies have since their inception claimed to improve the quality of the software product. The agile practitioners have also claimed that use of the agile approach has greatly improved the quality of their products. However, software quality is a rather complex concept; in fact some have defined the entire discipline of software engineering as the production of quality software. Quality according to ISO 9000 is defined as "the totality of characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs." In the existing agile literature there as not been a comprehensive definition of which characteristics of software quality are improved by the use of agile processes in developing software. In this paper an innovative technique is introduced for evaluating agile methodologies in order to determine which factors of software quality they improve. The technique uses a set of adapted software quality factors as defined by Bertrand Meyer and McCall.