Adding to Agile Software Development

ABSTRACT

How integrating DFSS into agile software development can help address the human aspects of these processes A German university of applied sciences with about 5,500 students needed new software due to COVID-19-related laws and decrees that required universities to perform contact tracking in case of potential COVID-19 exposure. Agile is a software development philosophy based on using self-organized teams.2 The goal of agile is to develop a basic working version of the software quickly, and continuously improve the software and add more features in accordance with customer or stakeholder wishes.3 Unlike many other software development methods, agile does not have predefined stages or documents4 and is ideally suited to coping with evolving and changing stakeholder requirements.5 One advantage of agile is discovering software design flaws quicker than classic stage-based software development models.6 Finding design flaws quickly is advantageous because fixing the software design late in the project is costly and time consuming. The problem statement was a verbal "digitize contact tracking," and there were frequent attempts to expand the project to include additional objectives such as ensuring people maintained social distancing, registering students for study spaces and improving carbon dioxide monitoring. Leveraging DFSS While agile is well suited to software development, it is less suited to dealing with many of the organizational problems that were encountered. [...]future projects would benefit from integrating a DFSS framework into such projects.