EVENTS

Ann Gledson from University of Manchester will talk in the HiRSE Seminar about Agile Methods for RSEs. 

Abstract

The University of Manchester RSE department currently services around 70 research projects with the collective pipeline of projects just short of 100. Our department of 48 engineers is built to support research and academics; however, the scale of the operation brings with it complex managerial challenges around managing workloads, maintaining relationships with researchers and ensuring successful, collaborative project delivery. We need to ensure that our RSE developers and senior RSEs (in their capacity as project managers) are prepared and supported with adequate tooling and processes to deliver these projects both flexibly and consistently.

Consequently, we have implemented our own flavour of “Scrum” within GitHub projects. Scrum is a popular implementation of the principles of agile project management and software development. According to the Scrum Guide (https://www.scrum.org/resources/scrum-guide), Scrum is a lightweight agile framework that helps people, teams and organisations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems. This, to us, sounds an awful lot like research!

In this presentation, we will explain how agile working methods encourage a mindset where changes in requirements are the norm and where the solution development process embraces that change. In Scrum, this is achieved by continuously updating the requirements, working in “timeboxes”, and continuously engaging our academic customers. We have rolled our adaptation out across the department via a practical 2-day course for all RSEs and successfully tested it on an increasing number of research projects.

Attendees will learn how a Scrum Team works, and two of the available project management tools (Jira and GitHub Projects) with a focus on the latter. They will have a theoretical understanding of Scrum ‘Roles’, ‘Artefacts’ and ‘Ceremonies’. It will increase their understanding of how agile and scrum has been adapted within an RSE team and increase their ability to decide whether this process would be useful in their own workplaces/teams.

Institutions

• Helmholtz Platform for Research Software Engineering - Preparatory Study