Agile software development and service science : how to develop IT-enabled services in an interdisciplinary environment

This paper received the Best Research Paper Award from SEA 2013This paper shows the necessary steps, which should be taken in order to get the most out of agile software development in an interdisciplinary setting where scientific experts are involved. If applied properly, Agile delivers increased productivity, higher quality and, last but not least, higher customer satisfaction. The task of developing high quality software is difficult enough as it is. Developing software for a new IT-enabled service in an interdisciplinary team is even more challenging. Scientific experts from different fields need to work together with computer scientists, developers, testers, business analysts and domain experts. One of the main problems seems to be the fact, that the software engineering part is very time-consuming. For scientific experts who have never been involved in a software project, it is hard to understand why progress sometimes seems so slow. Therefore, it is important that they understand what it takes to write high-quality code, i.e. code that is clean, tested, documented and extendable at the right points. The best way to achieve this goal is to expand the software team, make the scientific experts an integral part of it and thus profit from their know-how