Maintenance in Scrum

Abstract

Scrum is an iterative, timeboxed agile software development methodology. In Scrum the work items that need to be done are planned at the beginning of the iterations called sprints. When this is done the Scrum team proceeds uninterrupted with the planned tasks. No new tasks can be added to the sprint content during the iteration. Software maintenance refers to the task of keeping a software system in a state of repair. Software maintenance work can sometimes require immediate attention. The question of interest for this thesis is how urgent tasks, such as software maintenance tasks, can be handled in Scrum if the maintenance task has to be dealt with during the sprint. Is there a way to minimize the impact these unanticipated tasks have on the normal sprint work? This thesis will discuss the solutions offered by Scrum how to handle urgent unplanned work. The same will be done for Kanban and Scrum-ban. Finally the paper will introduce a study on maintenance work done by Scrum teams during the sprints to give a concrete example of the issue. The study will show that there are ways to do planning in Scrum in such a way that urgent work will cause a minimum of disruption to planned sprint work.