Exploring ScrumBut—An empirical study of Scrum anti-patterns

•Companies resort to deviations from Scrum practices, sometimes for sensible reasons.•Smaller companies seem to avoid anti-patterns more than larger ones.•Companies having more Scrum experience tend to use anti-patterns more.•Transformation to agile methods is particularly challenging regarding to testing.•Development process should not affect to the customer relationships. The wide-spread adoption of the agile movement has rapidly changed the landscape of software industry. In particular, Scrum is an agile process framework that has become extremely popular in industry. However, the practical implementation of Scrum in companies rarely follows the text book ideals, as companies often deviate from the proposed Scrum practices for various reasons. While some deviations may be well motivated and reasonable, companies can also be tempted to adjust Scrum for the company without clearly understanding the consequences of the deviations. In this paper our aim is to identify ways of potentially harmful mishandling of Scrum in industry based on empirical data collected in semi-structured interviews involving 18 teams in 11 companies. The (mal)practices that were identified at least in three different teams are presented in a semi-formal manner as anti-patterns. The study resulted in 14 anti-patterns that express the context of the deviation, the deviation itself, the broken core principles of Scrum, and the possible consequences of the deviation. In addition, where available, we have included company recommendations regarding the deviations. Furthermore, we identify potential risk areas in Scrum based on an analysis of the relationships between anti-patterns and Scrum concepts.