Improving the Management of Cost and Scope in Software Projects Using Agile Practices

While organizations want to develop software products with reduced cost and flexible scope, stories aboutthe applicability of agile practices to improve project development and performance in the softwareindustry are scarce and focused on specific methodologies such as Scrum and XP. Given these facts, thispaper aims to investigate, through practitioners' perceptions of value, which agile practices are being usedto improve two performance criteriafor software projects—cost and scope. Using a multivariate statisticaltechnique known as Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA),the results suggest that the use of agile practicescan be represented infactors which describedifferent applicationsin software development processtoimprove cost and scope.Also, we conclude that some agile practices should be used together in order to getbetter efficiency on cost and scope in fourdevelopmentaspects: improving (a) team abilities, (b)management of requirements, (c) quality of the code developed, and (d) delivery of software on-budget andon-time