Name of the participant: Kleophas Model
Description of the IT research project: Within software-intensive business environments, product development activities face the challenge of satisfying two relevant trends advancing over the last years. On the one hand, agile process models (e.g. Scrum) are gaining importance, due to a highly dynamic business environment that requires short product life cycles. On the other hand, increasing globalization as well as multidisciplinary cooperative product development lead to geographically distributed project environments. In these environments, a variety of organizational problems (e.g., communication or collaboration issues) arise.
These two trends confront science and practice with problems that have been insufficiently researched to date. Agile process models, especially Scrum, are not entirely consistent with the circumstances of distributed project environments. For example, agile process models usually require personal, synchronous communication, while extensive documentation is avoided. In contrast, distributed project environments imply impersonal, asynchronous communication (e.g. via e-mail, software tools, etc.) as well as a high degree of documentation.
This apparent contradiction and incompatibility of these two trends often results in method tailoring and configuration in practice, so that agile process models are integrated with plan-driven process models towards so-called ‘hybrid process models’. Traditional requirements engineering activities are gaining importance when it comes to hybrid process models that integrate agile and plan-driven process models. In the context of product backlog prioritization, Scrum requires methodological support for requirements prioritization.
However, to that date, there is no software tool that supports requirements prioritization in distributed Scrum software development projects. The SWAPS research project aims to develop a software tool based on an aligning scientifically founded methodology.
Software Campus partners: Universität Stuttgart, Software AG
Implementation period: 01.03.2021 – 28.02.2023
