Software Engineering Collaboration

Informatics administration is trying something new this semester. We are collaborating with Dr. Vail from the Computer Science Department. He is implementing a new work system (framework) that he was able to observe and participate in during his sabbatical in Spring of 2016 with his software engineering course, CSIS-457. The new system is called Scrum. It has become very popular in the developing world. The basic concept of the system is to meet often and set realistic goals (sprints). At each meeting, you would re-assess plan (backlog) and plan the next sprint. One of the main goals of scrum is to improve a product in a faster manner by focusing on smaller tasks with a high intensity.

Dr. Vail invited us to propose some project ideas for a group of five students to work on. We met with him and proposed a few different projects that we thought would be manageable for a semester time period. We found a project that should work well with the scrum framework and help our department with a legitimate project. He invited us to be the Product Owner. This is one of three roles in scrum. The Product Owner helps the team prioritize on what is needed to be completed first. We have committed to attempt to attend most of the class periods on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This should help our team move at a decent pace while allowing us to learn and observe scrum in process. We are interested in analyzing this system to see if it would benefit us to adopt it with our development team.