Artificial intelligence in the service of Scrum?

The adoption of agile practices continues to progress within companies listed on the CAC 40 (French stock market index), in all sectors.

 

Scrum – a very popular method? 

The experience acquired by experts over the years has enabled them to measure the effects of these methods on their results and influenced their choice of method. According to the 'State Of Agility' report released by Versions One in 2017, 82% of agile teams use Scrum (an agile framework for managing work with an emphasis on software development),?either alone (58% of teams), or alongside other agile practices, such as eXtreme Programming (24% of teams).

Behind this great success lies a much sadder reality. According to the CHAOS research 2013 report, a large-scale project is ten times more likely to fail completely, which means that it will be cancelled or left unused because it has become irrelevant before even being deployed, while?only?64%?of projects achieve their objectives.

26% of software development companies state that?half of their projects deviate from their objectives in terms of costs, deadlines or scope by more than?15%. This is the result of poor collaboration and a lack of understanding of the method. 

 

Artificial intelligence to assist Scrum 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now considered to be a strategic component of business growth. 72% of management-level staff interviewed by Accenture recognise that AI plays a major role in the ability of companies to increase their productivity.

 AI solutions available today to address Scrum issues do not deliver the desired improvements for a number of reasons. The main reason is negligence of the human factor, which is the cause of the lack of understanding of the Scrum method.

There are many fantasies about AI replacing management tasks. A number of attempts to create tools or applications have been made with many failures. However, these provide a gold mine of feedback that helps us to improve.?We learn from our mistakes, as well as those of others, and are moving in the right direction. There still remains a certain (human) reticence, but tomorrow, the use of these tools will be as natural as ordering your shopping using your personal assistant. The question is when you will make the transition? 

At SQLI, as part of our research programme, we are looking to develop a number of artificial intelligence solutions to enable your teams to be more efficient, by optimising the work of all project team members (including developers, scrum masters, product owners and project managers).

Agile workers: get ready!