ScrumLint: Identifying Violations of Agile Practices Using Development Artifacts
This addresses the problem of ensuring agile practice adherence for software development teams, though it is incremental as it builds on existing linting concepts for processes.
The paper tackles the challenge of providing concrete feedback on agile process conformance by introducing ScrumLint, a tool that analyzes development artifacts to identify violations of agile practices, enabling development teams to receive immediate feedback and improve their workflows.
Linting tools automatically identify source code fragments that do not follow a set of predefined standards. Such feedback tools are equally desirable for "linting" agile development processes. However, providing concrete feedback on process conformance is a challenging task, due to the intentional lack of formal agile process models. In this paper, we present ScrumLint, a tool that tackles this issue by analyzing development artifacts. On the basis of experiences with an undergraduate agile software engineering course, we defined a collection of process metrics. These contain the core ideas of agile methods and report deviations. Using this approach, development teams receive immediate feedback on their executed development practices. They can use this knowledge to improve their workflows, or can adapt the metrics to better reflect their project reality.