PI: Dr. Matthias Uflacker

Abstract

Design Thinking has shown its value as a methodology for the generation of innovative ideas on numerous occasions, ranging from short boot camps to extensive projects within global companies. Its integration into development processes of large IT companies, however, remains subject to research and the primary target of our second year project proposal.

In the past project year, we conducted interviews with software developers and Design Thinkers in order to identify common pitfalls of previous integration approaches. Based on these findings and extensive literature reviews, we created a prototypical process, called DT@SCRUM, that promotes a gradual transition from Design Thinking to Software Engineering activities. This process was prototypically tested in an ME310 project and revealed several aspects that require further experimental verification. In particular, we aim at testing the feasibility of Scrum's Planning Poker to estimate the required effort for Design Thinking activities, the organization of transitional workshops for handovers from ideation to software engineering, and tool support that can be implemented based on our previous AnalyzeD project. With these additions, a well-rounded process proposal will be created that provides IT companies with the possibility to seamlessly integrate Design Thinking into their software development activities.