Agile Methods for RSEs: A formula for scrum-driven software development in research?

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.