Business Architecture for Product Owners

Abstract

Agile approaches—and Scrum in particular—are well-established in software development. The product owner (PO) is one of only a few roles in Scrum and connects the development team with product management: he is responsible for maximizing the value by prioritizing the backlog (the list of planned changes for the software product).Agile values working software more than comprehensive documentation and favors face-to-face communication over any other means, leading to only limited explicit documentation within agile teams. However, to analyze the requirements for the backlog, sufficient documentation of the product is still needed. Furthermore, measuring the efficiency of the team is far more common than measuring the value delivered. Just as one should know how something currently works to change it, the available product knowledge is crucial in an ever-changing environment. Different frameworks for enterprise architecture (EA) support the understanding of an organization and its different aspects. While some aspects cover concrete implementation, the elements of the “business layer” fortunately cover many aspects that are relevant to a PO.Even though enterprise or business architecture strives to increase agility, no research has been conducted yet on applying EA to agile software development. In addition, EA is used only limitedly when generating requirements in software development. Also, maintaining product documentation in a sustainable way is scarcely covered in the literature. For this research project, a business architecture framework was designed as a sustainable product documentation that supports the PO in generating and managing the product backlog while adhering to agile concepts. The prototype consists of elements that are relevant for a PO and are structured to a comprehensive view and maintained throughout the development iterations. Different aspects such as the design decisions or their applicability in practice were validated by both researchers and practitioners using design science research....