The Impact of Scrum on Customer Satisfaction: An Empirical Study

In the beginning of the last decade, agile methodologies emerged as a response to software development processes that were based on rigid approaches. In fact, the flexible characteristics of agile methods are expected to be suitable to the less-defined and uncertain nature of software development. However, many studies in this area lack empirical evaluation in order to provide more confident evidences about which contexts the claims are true. This paper reports an empirical study performed to analyze the impact of Scrum adoption on customer satisfaction as an external success perspective for software development projects in a software intensive organization. The study uses data from real-life projects executed in a major software intensive organization located in a nation wide software ecosystem. The empirical method applied was a cross-sectional survey using a sample of 19 real-life software development projects involving 156 developers. The survey aimed to determine whether there is any impact on customer satisfaction caused by the Scrum adoption. However, considering that sample, our results indicate that it was not possible to establish any evidence that using Scrum may help to achieve customer satisfaction and, consequently, increase the success rates in software projects, in contrary to general claims made by Scrum´s advocates.