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How We Successfully Adapted Agile for a Research-Heavy Engineering Software Team

In our development team at Sandia National Laboratories we have honed our Scrum processes to where we continually deliver high-performance engineering analysis software to our customers. We deliver despite non-ideal circumstances, including development work that can be categorized as exploratory research, regular use of part-time developers, team size that varies widely among Sprints, highly specialized technical skill sets and a broad range of deliverables. We believe our methodologies can be applied to many research-oriented environments such as those found in government laboratories, academic institutions and corporate research facilities. Our goal is to increase the adoption of Lean/Agile project management in these environments by sharing our experiences with those research-oriented development teams who are considering using Lean/Agile, or have started and are encountering problems. In this paper we discuss how we create and prioritize our product backlog, write our user stories, calculate our capacity, plan our Sprints, report our results and communicate our progress to customers. By providing guidance and evidence of success in these areas we hope to overcome real and perceived obstacles that may limit the adoption of Lean/Agile techniques in research-oriented development environments.