Agile Research Team: The Adaption of Scrum to Academic Research

This project proposes the introduction of agile software development methods into an academic research group, which is one of the first times that agility has been introduced in the research sphere. The agile method Scrum, which has been successful both in industry and the classroom, was adapted to fit the constraints and needs of an academic research group. This new group structure has been coined the Agile Research Team. A traditional, hierarchal research group has limitations in growth and performance, as projects and researchers are all limited in a top-down fashion. This limits the idea generation process, the projects that can be worked on, and the number of students that can participate. By removing the hierarchy and introducing agility, we argue that the knowledge and skill transfer of the group improves, the motivation of individuals is increased, and the group becomes more scalable and more inclusive. This project presents the structure of the Agile Research Team created and discusses initial results and lessons learned after the experimental collection of results, showing that there are potential benefits to forming an agile research team