# What Do Practitioners Vary in Using Scrum?

## TL;DR

This study investigates how ten German companies adapt Scrum in practice, revealing significant variations in implementation that often deviate from the original framework, influenced by organizational history and context.

## Contribution

It provides qualitative insights into real-world Scrum adaptations across multiple companies, highlighting common variations and their underlying reasons.

## Key findings

- All companies vary Scrum in some way
- Least variations are in Sprint length, events, team size, requirements engineering
- Many variations are due to organizational history or context

## Abstract

Background: Agile software development has become a popular way of developing software. Scrum is the most frequently used agile framework, but it is often reported to be adapted in practice. Objective: Thus, we aim to understand how Scrum is adapted in different contexts and what are the reasons for these changes. Method: Using a structured interview guideline, we interviewed ten German companies about their concrete usage of Scrum and analysed the results qualitatively. Results: All companies vary Scrum in some way. The least variations are in the Sprint length, events, team size and requirements engineering. Many users varied the roles, effort estimations and quality assurance. Conclusions: Many variations constitute a substantial deviation from Scrum as initially proposed. For some of these variations, there are good reasons. Sometimes, however, the variations are a result of a previous non-agile, hierarchical organisation.