Context. A clear software process definition is important because it can help developers to share a common understanding and improve the development effectiveness. However, if the misconceptions or misunderstandings are introduced to the team during the process definition, it will bring numerous uncertain problems to the projects and reduce the productivity. Scrum is one of the most popular Agile development processes. It has been frequently used in software development. But the misunderstanding of usage of the Scrum method always leads to situations where teams cannot achieve the hyper-productivity even failure. Therefore, introducing a reasonable graphical language for describing the Scrum process may help learners to gain a correct and common understanding of the Scrum method.

Objectives. In this study, we introduce a graphical Domain Specific Language for modeling the Scrum process and specific Scrum projects. Further, we evaluated the proposed language to figure out if and how this language can help developers learn Scrum method and understand the specific Scrum projects. For the first, we decide to extract the essential elements and their relative relationships of the Scrum process, and based on that, we define and specify the graphical language. After that, we evaluate the proposed graphical language to validate whether this language can be considered as useful to help developers to learn Scrum method and understand the specific Scrum projects.

Methods. In order to define the graphical language, we studied and reviewed the literature to extract the essential elements and their relationships for describing the Scrum process. Based on that, we defined and specified the graphical DSL. With the aim of evaluating the proposed graphical language, we performed the experiment and survey method. This experiment was conducted in an educational environment. The subjects were selected from the undergraduate and master students. At the same time, we carried out a survey to capture the developers‘ opinions and suggestions towards the proposed language in order to validate its feasibility.

Results. By studying the literature, we listed and specified the essential elements for describing the Scrum process. By executing the experiment, we evaluated the efficiency and effectiveness of learning Scrum in using the proposed language and the natural language. The result indicates that the graphical language is better than the natural language in training Scrum method and understanding specific Scrum projects. The result shows that the proposed language improved the understandability of the Scrum process and specific Scrum projects by more than 30%.

We also performed a survey to investigate the potential use of the proposed graphical DSL in industry. The Survey results show that participants think the proposed graphical language can help them to better understand the Scrum method and specific Scrum projects. Moreover, we noticed that the developers who have less Scrum development experience show more interests in this proposed graphical language.

Conclusions. To conclude, the obtained results of this study indicate that a graphical DSL can improve the understandability of Scrum method and specific Scrum projects. Especially in managing the specific Scrum project, subjects can easily understand and capture the detailed information of the project described in the proposed language. This study also specified the merits and demerits of using the graphical language and textual language in describing the Scrum process.

From the survey, the result indicates that the proposed graphical language is able to help developers to understand Scrum method and specific Scrum projects in industry. Participants of this survey show positive opinion toward the proposed graphical language. However, it is still a rather long way to applying such a graphical language in Scrum projects development because companies have to consider the extra learning effort of the graphical DSL.