Software Product Management and Agile Software Development: Conflicts and Solutions
Agile software development has been established over the last 15 years as a popular development approach. In a time when speed of change is of utmost importance, agile approaches are often the most appropriate roads to success. They do not only change the
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Abstract
Agile software development has been established over the last 15 years as a popular development approach. In a time when speed of change is of utmost importance, agile approaches are often the most appropriate roads to success. They do not only change the way development is performed, but they also impact other parties involved in development projects, in particular the software product manager. Software companies are faced with the question how software product management and agile development can work together in an optimal way. Who is responsible for requirements? Is the software product manager automatically the designated “product owner” (Scrum)? Or is “product owner” a new and separate role? Does he/she replace the software product manager? The Software Product Management Framework which has been developed by the International Software Product Management Association (ISPMA e.V., www.ispma.org) provides orientation. It can be used as a helpful tool to make the change process towards agile development successful.
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Introduction
Agile – what a wonderful word! Everybody wants to be agile. Marketing people rejoice! Amazing that some presumably nerdy software people came up with the idea to use that term in relation to a new approach for software development and set the fundamentals of that new approach in stone with the “Agile Manifesto”
Special thanks to Gerald Heller for inspiring discussions in the preparation of our joint invited talk on “Software Product Management and Agility” at the International Workshop on Software Product Management (IWSPM) 2012 in Essen, Germany. H.-B. Kittlaus InnoTivum Consulting, Rheinbreitbach, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. Maedche et al. (eds.), Software for People, Management for Professionals, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-31371-4_5, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
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(Beck et al. 2001). Over the last 15 years this approach has changed the landscape of software development methodology in a significant way. Agile – as opposed to slow, bureaucratic, old-fashioned, complicated, hindering. Both the Agile Manifesto and the Scrum Guide (Schwaber and Sutherland 2011) are clearly focused on software development only. But it must have been too tempting to extend the scope of that word to other areas. Roman Pichler uses it in “Agile Product Management with Scrum” (Pichler 2010) which deals with the role of “Product Owner” in Scrum without explaining that the spectrum of activities and responsibilities of a product manager is much larger than this product owner role. Dean Leffingwell writes about “Agile Software Requirements” (Leffingwell 2011) – oops, not just people, process, or methodology are agile, the requirements themselves are. This semantic mismatch should not keep anybody from reading the book since it provides a rather balanced approach how Software Product Management and agile methodologies can be combined. The Requirements Engineering (RE) community wants to be agile as well (see Rainer Grau’s article in this book on “Agile RE”). Agil
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