Nowadays, with global software development, software process improvement models have again focused the scientific community’s attention. The need to increase the probability of success in these projects appears as the main reason to use a software process improvement model. In this article, a quick literature review was conducted to find evidence of using traditional process improvement models in agile software development. A total of fifteen primary studies were meticulously selected, from which significant insights were extracted for this research. This work’s main contribution is identifying the challenges of using a software process improvement model. In conclusion, despite the evidence on the use of models, there is still a need to facilitate their integration into agile models such as Scrum. © 2024 The Authors.