The Diversity of Approaches to Support Software Project Management in the Agile Context: Trends, Comparisons and Gaps

Abstract

The literature has reported a significant number of approaches to support software development teams. Due to this diversity of approaches, the process of choosing which one is the most suitable for a given project becomes a complex task as new approaches emerge. In addition, there has been no comprehensive work on what these project management approaches are, nor what their main advantages and limitations are. Therefore, it becomes important to research the characteristics of these approaches and map them to minimize decision challenges. Therefore, the objective of this work is to identify primary studies in software engineering that present approaches to support the management of software projects in the agile context. To achieve this goal, we conducted a systematic review study and selected 65 studies on software project management approaches. From these studies, we identified eight different types of approaches, with software being the most used approaches in this context. In addition, nine project areas were identified in which these approaches focus, among which "Schedule" and "Quality" stand out as the areas with the greatest focus by the approaches. Finally, we identified that the "Planning" is the phase of the project in which the approaches place more emphasis.