Meeting Industry-Academia Research Collaboration Challenges with Agile Methodologies

Continuous and long-term collaboration between industry and academia is crucial to develop front-line research in context-dependent areas like software development where both practitioners and researchers are searched for data collection, analysis and results. Despite many mutual benefits, this collaboration is often challenging, not only due to different goals, but also because of different pace in providing the results. The software development industry has during the last decade aligned around and organized their development adopting agile methodologies. For the researchers, the agile methodologies are a topic for a research, rather than a means of performing the research itself. We can state a question, whether the agile methodologies can be a good common ground for enabling successful research collaboration between industry and academia? This paper reports on a longitudinal industry - academia research collaboration case, which has stepwise adapted SCRUM over a six-year period. The implementation of SCRUM and the collaboration successes and challenges are presented, and findings are discussed.