ALPS

Agile and Lean Project Management and Scaling

ALPs will identify current issues and practices in decision making and project management in agile/lean software development contexts; develop optimal solutions, implement them in industry, and evaluate their effectiveness. It will develop, deploy and evaluate software tools to support best practices.

Excellent management and decision making underpins the success of software development projects. However, little research has focused on these issues. Various approaches to agile systems development, and in particular a drive towards lean processes, present a variety of challenges for decision making and project management. The team, rather than a person, manages the project, so issues such as customer involvement, shifting responsibilities and simultaneous development and testing require a new approach to project management, with multiple actors involved in decision processes. The gap in extant research becomes even more pertinent when we consider that contemporary implementations of agile go beyond small co-located teams as was originally intended, with non-standard implementations now widespread i.e. large teams, start-ups, distributed development environments, greenfield sites, educational environments, open source development, outsourcing, and systems maintenance. In particular, ALPs will address the following challenges:

In agile development contexts, information is often spread across a range of collaboration platforms and/or information sources. There is a need to identify and incorporate information from relevant platforms/sources to enable more efficient decision making and project management in such environments.
Relevant project information should be available to members of an agile team to support best practices. New approaches for interaction and data presentation are needed to support decision making and project management.