Agile Software & System Development

Lean and Agile Product Management
Today, the development of software-based products usually takes place in dynamic environments where technologies and markets are rapidly changing. Requirements for software products can usually not be defined in advance. You can also not ask the customer what features he would like. In such situations, classical approaches to software development with predefined requirements are not suitable. How do you get products that customers want and love? For this, there are novel development approaches that interlink agile software development methods such as Scrum with processes for the idea-finding and validation of critical product assumptions. The product manager, who is responsible for the so-called "product backlog", plays a central role here.

The aim of the research is to develop, analyze and test new techniques and application possibilities of the product management. This includes the description of a product vision, the development of a product strategy, the identification and prioritization of critical product assumptions, the data-based testing of critical assumptions with the help of experiments and the further development of the product strategy based on the results of the experiments. Further research topics are startup methods, corporate startups, hypothesis-driven development, scaling lean, customer development, LeanUX, business model validation, as well as evidence-based service systems engineering.

Data- and Value-driven Software Development
Data are the gold of the information age. But how to lift this treasure and use it for the efficient development of successful software? In the context of software development, "Analytics" is the targeted collection, analysis, interpretation and use of data with the aim of improving the development, maintenance and operation of software and software systems, as well as increasing their utility and market success.

The aim of the research is to develop, analyze and test basic measurement methods and analytics techniques. This includes goal-oriented measurement and analysis procedures and the development and application of quality, cost and benefit models. Other research areas include Lean Analytics, Traction Modeling, Value Modeling, Startup Metrics and Growth Hacking.

Agile Engineering (Integration of agile and traditional models)
In the last few years, more and more agile elements have entered the professional software development. Methods and approach models such as scrum, continuous integration, continuous deployment, kanban and customer involvement are used extensively. The advantages of these methods and process models are, in particular, faster development cycles, faster customer feedback and thus rapidly accelerated learning cycles.

On the other hand, there are still successfully practiced traditional software development processes, which are based on the V model. In regulated domains such as the automotive industry, mechanical engineering, medical technology or the financial sector, long-term and comprehensive hedges are required. Traditional processes have proven themselves here. In the automotive industry, for example, there are well-defined V-model-based development processes in drive train development. Agile development processes, however, appear more appropriate when it comes to creating new functions that are based, for example, on an electric drive, quickly and at least prototypically. The combination of traditional processes and agile practices promises many advantages.

The aim of the research is to analyze the suitability of agile methods in regulated domains and to test them. The interaction of traditional and agile approaches is to be examined and tested. Other research areas include agile scaling, agile business transformation, organizational change management and agile product lines.

Selected Books

Jürgen Münch, Ove Armbrust, Martin Soto, Martin Kowalczyk, “Software Process Definition and Management“, Springer Verlag, 2012.

Victor R. Basili, Adam Trendowitz, Martin Kowalczyk, Carolyn Seaman, Jürgen Münch, Dieter Rombach, “Aligning Organizations Through Measurement – The GQM+Strategies Approach”, Springer Verlag, 2014.

Jürgen Münch, Klaus Schmid (Eds.), “Perspectives on the Future of Software Engineering“, Springer Verlag, 2013.

Marco Kuhrmann, Jürgen Münch, Ita Richardson, Andreas Rausch, Jason He Zhang (Eds.). “Managing Software Process Evolution – Traditional, Agile, and Beyond. How to Handle Process Change?”, Springer Verlag, 2016

Selected Publications

Eveliina Lindgren, Jürgen Münch. Raising the Odds of Success: The Current State of Experimentation in Product Development. Information and Software Technology, 2016.

Fabian Fagerholm, Alejandro Sanchez Guinea, Hanna Mäenpää, Jürgen Münch. The RIGHT Model for Continuous Experimentation. Journal of Systems and Software, 2016.

Eveliina Lindgren, Jürgen Münch. Development as an Experiment System: A Qualitative Survey on the State of the Practice. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP 2015), May 25-29, Helsinki, Finland, LNBIP, Spring-er-Verlag, pp. 2015.

Olli Rissanen, Jürgen Münch. Continuous Experimentation in the B2B Domain: A Case Study. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Rapid Continuous Software Engineering (RCoSE 2015), Florence, Italy, pages 12-18. ACM, May 2015.

Fabian Fagerholm, Alejandro Sanchez Guinea, Hanna Mäenpää, Jürgen Münch. Building Blocks for Continuous Experimentation. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Rapid Continuous Software Engineering (RCoSE 2014), Hyderabad, India, pages 26-35, June 2014.

Fabian Fagerholm, Alejandro Sanchez Guinea, Jay Borenstein, Jürgen Münch. Onboarding in Open Source Projects. IEEE Software, 31(6):54-61, 2014.

Fabian Fagerholm, Alejandro S. Guinea, Jürgen Münch, Jay Borenstein. The Role of Mentoring and Project Characteristics for Onboarding in Open Source Software Projects. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2014), Torino, Italy, September 2014.

Frank Elberzhager, Jürgen Münch, Danilo Assmann. “Analyzing the Relationships between Inspections and Testing to Provide a Software Testing Focus”, Information and Software Technology (IST), vol. 56, no. 7, pp. 793–806, 2014.

The research group's curriculum includes agile product management, software / lean analytics, startup methods and software engineering core topics, such as software architectures or quality modeling. Students should be enabled to develop successful software-based products and services. In addition to software development, this also includes the integration of software and economic aspects in order to develop valid, scalable and sustainable digital business models.

• Software-based real-time value delivery, Need for Speed Program, Digile (2015-2017)
• Integration of Agile Software Development Processes into Classical Processes, Daimler (2015)
• Cloud Software Factory, Tekes (2011-2015)
• Cloud Software Program, TiViT (2011-2015)
• Dynamic identification, extraction and reuse of components in distributed software development, BMBF (2010-2012)
• Optimized configuration of standards-compliant domain-specific processes for SMEs, BMBF (2010-2011)
• Software Quality: Flexible Modeling and Integrated Controlling, BMBF (2008-2011)

The Research Group cooperates in the field of research with a large number of research facilities and networks. In recent years, collaboration with the following organizations and networks has been of particular importance:

• Aalto University, Finland
• DASMA, Germany
• Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
• Fraunhofer CESE, Maryland, USA
• IPA-SEC, Japan
• ISERN, International Network
• Mitsubishi Research, Japan
• Poznan University of Technology, Poland
• University of Bari, Italy
• University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
• University of Helsinki, Finland
• University of Maryland at College Park, USA
• University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA
• University of Oulu, Finland
• University of Southern Denmark (SDU), Denmark
• University of Tartu, Estonia
• University Rome Tor Vergata, Italy
• SER University of Novi Sad, Serbia

The research group has a large number of cooperation partners in the corporate language. Over the past two years, the collaboration with the following companies has been particularly important:

• Bittium
• Elektrobit
• Daimler AG
• Ericsson
• Facebook
• F-Secure
• MySecondWay
• Quentinel
• Steeri
• Tieto
• Solita

• 2019: ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award ICSSP 2019 - International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP’2019)
• 2018: ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award ICGSE 2018 - 13th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE’2018)
• 2018: Technical Research Best Paper: 10th Software Quality Days (SWQD’2018)
• 2017:  Best Industry Paper Award: 21st Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering Conference (EASE’2017) 
• 2014: Best Paper Award (Excellence in Engineering Education): IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON’2014)
• 2012: Ernst Otto Fischer Lehrpreis, Fakultät für Informatik der TU München