AgileEVM - earned value management in Scrum Projects

Scrum is an agile project management framework. This framework specifically focuses on maximizing return on investment (ROI). Scrum, however, does not define how to manage and track costs to evaluate actual ROI against the vision. A reasonable cost measurement that integrates with Scrum would help provide an additional feedback loop. We adapted earned value management (EVM), using values defined in Scrum. The result is called AgileEVM (agile earned value management) and is a simplified set of earned value calculations. From the values in Scrum, we derived a release date estimate using mean velocity and from this equation, generated an equivalent equation using traditional EVM techniques, thus establishing the validity of using EVM with the Scrum framework. Finally, we used this technique on two projects to further test our hypothesis. This investigation also helped us determine the utility of AgileEVM.