Agile in Science: Challenges and Successes

Brendan Billingsley, Aaron Caldwell, Danielle Harper, Waverly Hinton, Evan McQuinn, Ken Tanaka, David Neufeld

Abstract
Agile software development has transformed software development over the last few decades. The science software development community has been a late adopter, and has specific challenges related to science organizations. Over the last few years NGDC has transformed its software development to an agile, team-based philosophy. This agile transformation is based on a number of key foundations. Organizational support including upper management and a productive resource management team provide the environment to be successful. Common agile practices broadly used in agile software development including many common scrum and kanban techniques have bootstrapped a successful agile team process. Finally, we have a strong commitment to highly functional teams based on the work by Patrick Lencioni. These foundations have resulted in a highly productive team that works on the most important priorities for the datacenter with a lot of flexibility for the constant changes in priorities and requirements.