Agile software development and service science

This paper shows the necessary steps, which should be taken in order to get the most out of agile software development in interdisciplinary settings involving scientific experts. If applied properly, Agile delivers increased productivity, higher quality and, last but not least, higher customer satisfaction. The task of developing high quality software is already difficult. Developing software for a new IT-enabled service in an interdisciplinary team however, is even more challenging. In interdisciplinary projects scientific experts from different fields need to work together with computer scientists, developers, testers, business analysts and domain experts. Software engineering is very time-consuming and scientific experts who have never been involved in a software project, often find it hard to understand why progress sometimes seems so slow. Therefore, it is important that they understand what it takes to write high- quality code, i.e. code that is clean, tested, documented and extendable at the right points. The best way to achieve this goal is to expand the software team, make the scientific experts an integral part of it and thus profit from their know-how.