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1. Introduction
Project management (PM) is a common practice in the management of organizations. However, the current competition in the market is forcing companies to respond quickly to these changes and make organizational and processes adjustments, in order to drive their projects to remain competitive, and increase their profit margin, especially when the projects are embedded in business environments where uncertainties and constant changes are present.
In this context, projects involving innovation and software development are essential, which require high flexibility and agility due to dynamic and changing environments. This leads to evolving project requirements, accomplished with more speed, compromising design performance and, therefore, requires a significant effort to update the plans and ability to adapt to change. As a solution to this situation, many companies have recently chosen to use the agile project management (APM), which suggests techniques to adapt the process to absorb application, scope and product features changes (Angioni et al., 2006).
Misra et al. (2010) state that the agile software development (ASD) is an emerging approach in software engineering, which aims to improve quality, being initially defended by a group of 17 software professionals, who practiced a set of methods under the category “Light” and shared a common set of values for the software development. For the authors, because of the attractiveness and success of the ASD approach, many project managers, who followed the traditional model (plan based), gradually changed to projects management based on the agile principles. Larman (2004), Schwaber (2004) and Schwaber and Beedle (2007) indicate that these common principles were based on successful approaches in previous projects, and also the practical experience that resulted in failures in software development projects.
This study aims to verify the benefits obtained with the agile approach usage, applied to systems development, in an attempt to better understand this practice and the reason that has led many companies to use the agile model in search for added value, and achieve competitive advantage. The used research method was a case study in a pharmaceutical company, which applied the Scrum framework (an agile process model that was developed by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber in the early 1990s, according to Cervone, 2011; Misra et al., 2010; Pressman, 2006) to develop an inventory control...