Using an Interaction Room for Software Project Scoping (IR:scope)
This chapter describes how an Interaction Room is used in the initial phase of a software development project in order to help business and technical stakeholders to understand both the application domain and the technical constraints of the system under
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Using an Interaction Room for Software Project Scoping (IR:scope)
While agile process models encourage frequent communication with stakeholders, they are relatively silent on how to ensure that this communication will lead to valuable, actionable insights. The Interaction Room for Software Project Scoping (IR:scope) fills this methodical gap in agile process models: It provides a communication forum for all stakeholders in the project, enables the business and technical substance to be made visible and comprehensible, documents ideas and risks, and offers methodology guidelines to focus communication on the project aspects that are actually critical. All of this is accomplished in a deliberately pragmatic framework that does not add methodical ballast but integrates naturally with the agile approach. As described in Sect. 2.1, one of the main objectives of an Interaction Room is to make the complexities of large IT projects intuitively comprehensible. This is accomplished by sketching out models of various, complementary perspectives of the project: Large model sketches on all walls of the room are at the center of all communication in the Interaction Room. Business and technology experts jointly map the key system and user interfaces, process sequences, and data structures on large whiteboards. The various canvases of an Interaction Room help stakeholders deal with the structures, processes, and interfaces of an information system in the context of its business domain in a guided but pragmatic way. Parallel views of the business domain and technical systems help stakeholders from different backgrounds to develop a joint understanding of the system. Dependencies, contradictions, and uncertainties can be identified, and mutual respect is established for requirements, context, and complexity, both on the business and on the technology side. Once the project material has been made comprehensible this way, the next step is to identify aspects that make system development complex, costly or uncertain. Annotations are added to the sketches for this purpose and analyzed to derive recommendations for detailed requirements analysis and risk management.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 M. Book et al., Tamed Agility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41478-2_5
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Using an Interaction Room for Software Project Scoping (IR:scope)
The IR:scope supports the development of a joint understanding of the initial business and technical situation as well as the value-driven documentation of requirements and their critical discussion. To achieve this, representatives of all project stakeholders (Sect. 3.5) join in the Interaction Room in a series of workshops.
5.1
Relevant Stakeholders
In addition to the IR coaches and the process owner as representatives of the business side (Sects. 3.5.1–3.5.3), the technical stakeholders who will build and operate the system—application developers and operations experts—also have to be taken on board in the IR:scope. The business side includes user representatives as well. Their
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