Scrum in Research

Abstract

The article is focused on research management and cooperation within the research team and between the research team and enterprise (industrial or commercial) partners. It is a kind of meta-research (research on a research method). Roots of some problems of the current scientific research can be seen in a lot of isolation that still endures – both personal isolation of the individual scientists, and isolation of the academic world from the industrial/commercial one and vice versa that makes the scientific research applied practically impossible –, and in bad time and/or resource management. A lot of research activities are conducted by researchers itself who are excellent professionals in the area of investigation, however the communication skills or leadership is often lacking. It makes conducting research as cooperation of a team at least inefficient or unmanageable. The article focuses on Scrum method that is popular as a product oriented management method in software development. It comments Scrum – strictly team based activity, rigid but informal – as suitable candidate for management of some types of scientific research. A special attention is devoted to the aspect of iterative incremental deliveries that enable an operative planning of suitable ratio between scientific and practical tasks for each iteration (usually from 2 to 4 weeks) allowing monitoring and controlling milestones, industrial or commercial needs together with actual state of the research. A positive side effect is that the potentially idle workers can share task of the ‘opposite world’, and thus the experience of the scientist can be enriched by the real industrial task cognition, and vice versa. The paper describes a Scrum implementation in the scientific research, and shows some practical findings. A community web site www.scruminresearch.org loosely grouping people and teams applying Scrum in research is proposed as a conclusion. Such web site can help with sharing information, tips and tricks and could allow collaboration of research teams on tuning Scrum in research.