Sharing Knowledge Through Tangible Models: Designing Kickoff Workshops for Agile Software Development Projects

In software engineering, the programmer depends on precise descriptions of the system to be built. To get these descriptions, analysts condense the knowledge about the domain from observations and discussions with the users, the people that will eventually work with the software. The users have to communicate their knowledge about the domain and express their needs. With TBPM we have shown that it is possible for end users to express themselves by means of process models. We now transfer these findings to other fields in software engineering. We investigated in the discipline of requirements engineering, especially in the context of agile software development approaches. From practitioners we learned that during the first iterations, code tends to be thrown away completely since the initial requirements gathering phase is intentionally kept lean. We therefore introduced the concept of need-finding iterations and tackle this problem in our research. We develop a holistic workshop methodology to kick off agile software development projects in which a shared understanding among stakeholders is to be fostered. Discussions that would arise after a software prototype has been implemented are encouraged to be conducted at an earlier stage by making use of an adequate modeling solution. We propose story prototypes which essentially enrich user stories with control flow information and thereby are enhanced to show the big picture rather than just individual aspects of the system to be built. In such a kickoff workshop we encourage a detailed need-finding together with the customer by means of shared model building.