The Effects of Agile Methodologies on Software Project Management in Pakistani Software Companies

Abstract

Agile methodologies are always tends to increase the quality of software and also handling the complex software projects. However, the software companies in Pakistan have recently felt the disparity of producing successful software. In this context, an extensive survey has been conducted in 52 prominent software development companies of Pakistan to identify this remedy and the motivation behind this production discrepancy. It is revealed from the survey that there is a lack of empirical evidence in the relationship of agile methodologies with the effective and progressive management of software project management factors including, schedule, scope, risk, budget, quality and resources. Therefore, the proposed study delivers an extensive statistical comparison to determine the effectiveness of agile methodologies in terms of their effects on the project management factors. The results suggest that in general all agile methodologies play a significant role towards the successful software development in the software company. However, Extreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban and Agile modeling are the main determinants of production disparity among software companies. Furthermore, it is determined that the quality factor has a positive correlation with the rest of the factors. It is also found that the budget factor has significantly correlated with other five factors, while rest of the factors has insignificant correlation. We have also compared agile methodologies in terms of project management factors, which specify that each agile methodology has its own importance and effect with respect to managing different factors of project management.