Jumpstarting Scrum with Design Thinking

Abstract

To rapidly deliver solutions in this flexible environment, many companies have adopted agile software development processes, such as Scrum. But even though Scrum can help to deliver software solutions in a highly dynamic environment with unclear solution requirements, its main focus is not the delivery of radical new innovations. There is, however, a human- centered, prototype-driven innovation methodology called “Design Thinking” (DT), which shares many common principles with Scrum. These principles, amongst others, include an iterative workflow and a flexible process framework. Our hypothesis is that these two meth- odologies are compatible and that the merger of the two into one integrated DT@Scrum ap- proach would result in an agile software development process that could deliver the innova- tive customer-oriented products and services required by competitive companies. The