“Improving Teamwork and Increasing Effectiveness” - Interview with Daniel Scholz, dpiMAX Product Owner at DataPhysics Instruments

Working at DataPhysics Instruments for over ten years, Daniel Scholz knows and understands the needs of the company’s customers. This was an excellent premise when he took over responsibility for the product development of the new contact angle measuring system software, dpiMAX. As dpiMAX is developed in an agile way, Scholz fulfills the role of product owner within the scrum team. In this interview, he gives an insight into the agile development process and explains its advantages.

Dr. Michaela Laupheimer: Can you tell us what a scrum team is and how it differs from a team which follows a classical project management approach?

Daniel Scholz: A scrum team is a powerful squad that is particularly dedicated to solving complex tasks, like developing a new measuring software. The scrum framework, developed by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, specifies that the scrum team consists of a self-organised development team, a product owner, who is responsible for the product’s development path, and a scrum master, who helps the team manage the scrum process. According to this process, we have several regular meetings, such as a “daily” every morning, where we briefly talk about our current tasks. The biggest difference compared with classical development methods is that we work in consecutive, two-week-long “sprints”. These sprints always start with a sprint planning meeting, where we agree on our development goals for the next two weeks, and end with a sprint review, where we present the latest version of our software product with the newly implemented features. Finally, we do a sprint retrospective, where we review the effectiveness of the process. The whole system is geared towards improving our teamwork and increasing our effectiveness.

Laupheimer: That sounds very well-organised. And what are your personal tasks and duties as the product owner in the team?

Scholz: As the product owner I act as a link between the development team and the users and stakeholders of the developed software product. This means that I constantly communicate with these groups, collecting user feedback and notes for improvement as well as new ideas for future developments in the dpiMAX software. I summarise all the gathered input in the form of ‘user stories’, which explain what a user wishes to accomplish and why. Then I discuss those user stories with the development team. Together we determine possible software solutions, whereupon the developers estimate the implementation time and effort of the latter. On this basis, I can prioritise all the ideas for future development steps with regard to their complexity and potential benefit for the users and, hence, shape the roadmap for the upcoming sprints.

Laupheimer: I see you have a truly diverse and responsible assignment. What do you personally like best about your product owner job and the agile way of development? And do you maybe see something that could boost your work and the work of your team?

Scholz: It is great to collect and discuss innovative ideas and then see how, step by step, they become reality. I also like the rapidity of the agile development. We do not work for months or years, to fulfil an initially compiled specification sheet before we finally come up with a software product. Instead, we deliver a new software version every two weeks, after every sprint. In each new version, we implement several new features that effectively expand dpiMAX. So, whenever a great idea comes up, which promises improvement, we have the flexibility to implement it directly within the next sprints. Hence, in just a few weeks, we can present the new solution to our software users and hear their feedback. This feedback, by the way, is always greatly appreciated. Thus, I want to invite everyone to tell us whatever they have to say about the software! We value all feedback, because when we get to know what works well for the users and where there is room for improvements, we have the chance to continuously enhance dpiMAX for everyone.

Laupheimer: Thank you very much, Daniel, for these interesting insights into the software development process. I am sure the dpiMAX users greatly appreciate your and your teams’ commitment and will be happy to support you by providing feedback.

// This article is part of our company magazine, which you can read here for free. //