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

Requirements Engineering
User story on index cards
Burndown chart
Lanes in JIRA
Usability analysis
Mind map for the card-sorting menu

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.