Adopting Agile With Scrum by Outsourced Project Teams: A Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Attempts to adopt agile practices are challenged by outsourcing and distributed ways of working popularized in the world today. This paper focuses on outsourcing vendors and empirically examines the progress of agile and Scrum adoption in such environments through the case of information technology companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Qualitative content analysis was employed to analyze data obtained from 142 professionals from 43 companies, whose clients are located around the globe. The empirical results reveal a fairly good level of agile awareness in the tested community, but also confirm the findings of earlier research that obstacles to implementing Scrum in outsourced projects exist, emphasizing issues originating from distant Product Owners, diminished Scrum Master role, and customer influence. Team self-organization is recognized as the best adopted Scrum practice, while the product backlog definition, Scrum events, and the process managed through excessive meetings are among those that still require significant improvements.