Project management for agile software development
We support the development team of the Bucerius Law School in three main areas: Implementation of agile development processes, improvement of software usability, and optimization of communication with software users.
Project goals
The goals of this project are to support the development group that is responsible for the campus management system and the connected intranet. The group wanted to restructure the development process to enable the systematic implementation of new requirements and to improve the effectiveness of development planning. In addition, the development process was to involve software users (students, lecturers, and university staff) to ensure the creation of user-friendly software that fulfills all requirements of its target group.
Approach and methods
With our assistance, the Bucerius Law School introduced the agile development method Scrum:
- Defining Scrum roles and team structures
- Introducing sprint development cycles
- Organizing sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives
- Introducing the bug tracking system JIRA in combination with GreenHopper
- Conducting contextual user interviews for a better understanding of the users' tasks and requirements
- Elaborating change requests in the form of epics/user stories/tasks
- Organizing change requests and bugs in JIRA and organizing sprints with GreenHopper
- Communicating software changes to users as release notes and regular product presentations
The development team improves the usability of the campus management system in an ongoing process:
- Performing heuristic analyses of the usability
- Elaborating proposals for improvement of usability
- Standardizing terminology of the user interface
- Improving error messages
- Editing and standardizing menu structures of different modules by means of card sorting techniques
- Conducting regular interviews to evaluate workflows and to derive change requests for the software
Insights
About Bucerius Law School
Bucerius Law School is the first private law school in Germany. The school was founded in 2000 by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius.