From a Scrum Reference Ontology to the Integration of Applications for Data-Driven Software Development

Abstract Context : Organizations often use different applications to support the Scrum process, including project management tools, source repository and quality assessment tools. These applications store useful data for decision-making. However, data items often remain spread in different applications, each of which adopt different data and behavioral models, posing a barrier for integrated data usage. As a consequence, data-driven decisions in agile development are uncommon, missing valuable opportunities for informed decision making. Objective : Considering the need to address semantic issues to properly integrate applications that support the agile development process, we aim to provide a common and comprehensive conceptualization about Scrum in the software development context and apply this conceptualization to support application integration. Method : We have developed the Scrum Reference Ontology (SRO) and used it to semantically integrate Azure DevOps and Clockify. Results : SRO served as a reference model to build software artifacts in a semantic integration architecture that enables applications to automatically share, exchange and combine data and services. The integrated solution was used in the software development unit of a Brazilian government agency. Results demonstrate that the integrated solution contributed to improving estimates, provided data that helped allocate teams, manage team productivity and project performance, and enabled to identify and fix problems in the Scrum process execution. Conclusions : SRO can serve as an interlingua for application integration in the context of Scrum-process support. By capturing the conceptualization underlying Scrum, the reference ontology can address semantic conflicts and thereby support the development of integrated data-driven solutions for decision making.