International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 43– No.10, April 2012 20 A Case Study on Software Development Projects in Academic Knowledge Centers using SCRUM Sonali Pathak M.Tech, Student, Lovely Professional University, Computer Science Department Phagwara, Punjab, India Pushpendra Pateriya Assistant Professor, Lovely Professional University, Computer Science Department Phagwara, Punjab, India Preet Pal Assistant Profess, Lovely professional University, Computer Science Department Phagwara, Punjab, India ABSTRACT Software development processes are vital to the success of any software project .Traditional software methods have always been a choice in academic and industrial level around the globe. But nowadays agile methods are getting popularity in most of the software based companies. Agile methods are recent set of development techniques that apply human centered approach to software development. This would help fulfill the core objective of software development in academics. This would help to provide an effective space to students to work in team, interact with users, develop prototype, develop documentation and improve presentation skills. On the basis of a survey it was found that most of the academics projects are facing the problem of controlling and monitoring small projects and there is need to improve the project development in academics. On the basis of a case study using SCRUM method we have presented that, adopting agile methodology in academics based projects could help increase the quality of software projects and in increasing the awareness of agile methodology among the software stakeholders. The survey has shown that a highest percentage of people even don‟t have knowledge about the agile methodology. Keywords – Agile methods, customer‟s satisfaction, project management, Academic projects. 1. INTRODUCTION Agile software development helps to satisfy customers by delivering the valuable products as early as possible. This paper aims at providing an environment in universities and colleges where students and teachers could follow agile methodology for the development of the small software project. Agile methodology has gained popularity over the years and has increased the level of customer‟s satisfaction to highest. Tracking the history the hardware development was careful planning while software development was expected to satisfy itself [1] [2]. Increasing business needs have given rise to the software crisis which resulted in a need for planning , managing ,documenting to be a part of software development.Agile development methods have helped achieve these requirements.This philosophy encourages customer‟s satisfaction and early incremental development delivery of software ,small highly motivated project teams ,minimal software engineering work products, and overall development simplicity. Agile methods provide active and continuous communication between developers and customers [3]. In 2001 menifesto for Agile software development was signed.Software development methods have been brodly devided into two categories till today traditional methods and agile methods.Traditional methods are waterfall and its extension,prototyping ,rapid application development(RAD),spiral ,unified process and incremental.While agile methods are Extreame programming(ZP), scrum ,dynamic system development methods(DSDM), feature driven development (FDD), adaptive software development (ASD), and crystal[4].Surveys in various colleges based on the on the basis of their responses students have shown that there is a need to implement the agile methodology for the development of healthy software development environment in to the academic level. The lack of proper communication among team members and also the supervisor is also a major cause of failure of the project development at this level. Factors like lack of enthusiasm, commitment, financial support leads to unwarranted risk. So a better way of project development is facing these problems. More than 200 students from different universities were questioned to complete this survey to find out the success of agile methodology in academic level project. Success of agile methods in companies was analyzed on the basis of previous researches. According to a research most of the problems stem from stakeholder‟s problem. Most project failure issues have been found out to because of management issues rather than technical issues [4].According to most of the students in this survey most of them face this issue of project management and development rather than technical issues. A case study has been presented to justify the success if agile development in software project development at the academic level. Also an exclusive survey was conducted in software companies to justify that though most of the employees feel there is need to apply agile principles to the software development but there is a need to prepare and train students at the academic level so that they could be well aware of it while working with a software team. A survey in about 10 of the software companies was done and the hypothesis was proved to be true. 2. COMPARINGAGILE AND TRADITIONAL METHODS Agile methods are a set of light weight tools which help business people and developer‟s work together daily throughout the project [5] [6]. Agile software development helps to handle increasing uncertainty and complexity of software development. Most of the principles and practices of AMs comes from comes from well known theories in manufacturing. In fact ,AMs incorporate techniques from Theory of constraints(1984), just-In-Time(„70s), Total Quality Management(„80s), and Lean Production(end of „80s)[5].The main difference between Agile and non-Agile methods are [5]