The Impact of Working From Home on the Success of Scrum Projects: A Multi-Method Study

Abstract: The number of companies opting for remote working has been increasing over the years, and Agile methodologies, such as Scrum, were adapted to mitigate the challenges caused by the distributed teams. However, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed a fully working from home context, which has never existed before. This paper investigation a two-phased Multi-Method study. In the first phase, we uncover how working from home impacted Scrum practitioners through a qualitative survey. Then, in the second phase, we propose a theoretical model that we test and generalize using Partial Least Squares - Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) through a sample study of 200 software engineers who worked from home within Scrum projects. From assessing our model, we can conclude that all the latent variables are reliable and all the hypotheses are significant. Moreover, we performed an Importance-Performance Map Analysis (IPMA), highlighting the benefits of the home working environment and the use of Scrum for project success. We emphasize the importance of supporting the three innate psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the home working environment. We conclude that the home working environment and the use of Scrum both contribute to project success, with Scrum acting as a mediator.