Integrating Scrum With Other Design Approaches to Support Student Innovation Projects

Introduction

For emerging researchers, an understanding of research methods, paradigms and approaches is still developing. Students working in technology innovation are often coming from either the initial stages of higher education or the professional world, where the focus has been on developing artifacts. When translated into an educational context, artifacts are created by students as an outcome of a course of instruction and therefore are similar to the concept of products, which are the outcome of a Scrum process. In an agile software development context, the key outcome is working software (Beck et al., 2001), but in an educational context the set of artifacts is broader, and may include a range of outputs used for assessment, such as designs, reports, strategies, plans etc. Students undertaking this type of study have often not been exposed to the concept and application of research and often have little understanding of how research and product development fit together. They therefore struggle with framing their research, and understanding where the development of the artifact fits within the research process.

The various strands of design research (in both information systems and education) have been developed to help link artifact development with an empirical process, with a focus on rigor in both the development of the artifact and its evaluation. We use the broad term “design research” here to include both design science (also known as design science research) and design-based research, as described later. However, for emerging researchers, the link is not always clear between the development methodology and the research contribution. Design research methods can work well in more substantial research projects (such as doctoral projects) which are significantly longer and can support multiple full-cycle iterative designs, but are not ideal for the scale and learning focus of smaller student projects that may only take one semester.

The focus of this chapter is to outline the development of a guiding framework for emerging researchers so that they can balance the relevance of product development with the rigor of research within the constraints of short, learning-focused projects. This framework is based on iterative Scrum cycles supported by a Design Thinking phase and some complementary techniques drawn from design research. The development of this framework has arisen from the need to provide students with a process that would guide them when undertaking a research project focused on artifact development. Two different contexts of student research have been used as the motivation and testing ground for the ideas that have been incorporated into the framework presented in this chapter.