A Research Plan for the Integration of Design Thinking with Large Scale Software Development Projects

Design Thinking and agile software development processes are both widely adopted by innovative companies that try to create products with maximum end user value. Usually, the adopting companies work in smaller teams that tackle projects of manageable size, but huge companies are increasingly trying to adopt these methods in their large-scale projects as well. The main impediments for the adoption of the aforementioned methods in such settings are the strict requirements which, for example, enterprise software vendors have to fulfill. The need for complying with a plethora of mandatory product standards and providing comprehensive documentation of the development processes is not integrated naturally into the methodologies and, hence, tend to weaken their innovative potential. This chapter outlines our research agenda for a process model that combines agile software development processes, such as Scrum or Extreme Programming, with Design Thinking activities, while trying to maintain compliance with the previously mentioned product and process standards. Our initial process model is based on a series of expert interviews with people that previously applied Design Thinking in large companies, as well as on a thorough review of related work about similar approaches. We will further outline our evaluation process. This centers on a project-based university course that transfers the idea of Stanford’s ME310 to a computer-science-only setting. Investigating the teams’ virtual collaboration activities, but also using traditional research methods, such as questionnaires and interviews, helps us to continuously improve our process model and prepare it for future test-runs within large partner companies.