19th ICCRTS Conceptual Design of Targeted Scrum: Applying Mission Command to Agile Software Development

Software engineering and mission command are two separate but similar fields. Both are instances of complex problem solving in environments with ever changing requirements. Also, they have followed similar paths from using industrial age decomposition to deal with large problems to striving to be more agile and resilient. In fact, an entire subset of current soft-ware engineering techniques is known as agile methods. Our hypothesis is that modifications to an agile software development methodology (Scrum) based on inspirations from mission command can improve the software engineering process in terms of the planning, prioritiz-ing, and communication of software requirements and progress, as well as improve the overall product. Targeted Scrum is a modification of Scrum based on three inspirations from Mission Command: End State, Line of Effort, and Targeting. Those inspirations led to the creation of the Product Design Meeting and modifications of some current Scrum meetings and artifacts. We propose to test this hypothesis during a semester long graduate level software engineering class. The students will develop software using both methodologies. We will then assess how well these two methodologies assist the software development teams in planning and develop-ing the software architecture, prioritizing requirements, and communicating progress