Combining Design Thinking and Agile Development to Master Highly Innovative IT Projects

Abstract

Agile development methods have become mainstream. Notwithstanding the improvements they bring about in implementation, they are of little help for deciding what exact features are need-ed to address the core needs of customers: they mostly rely on the competence and domain knowledge of the product owner. This is an issue of paramount importance in innovative pro-jects with high ambiguity such as digitization projects because such projects require a detailed understanding of customers and their needs. In order to address this gap, we propose to follow a Design Up Front approach and to integrate the Design Thinking methodology, which aims at human-centered innovation, with agile development. Drawing on 25 student and research projects, we report key learnings concerning human aspects, knowledge management, and challenging of assumptions. Moreover, we offer practical recommendations for the integration of the two methodologies.