Metrics Driven Research Collaboration: Focusing on Common Project Goals Continuously

Research collaborations provide opportunities for both practitioners and researchers: practitioners need solutions for difficult business challenges and researchers are looking for hard problems to solve and publish. Nevertheless, research collaborations carry the risk that practitioners focus on quick solutions too much and that researchers tackle theoretical problems, resulting in products which do not fulfill the project requirements. In this paper we introduce an approach extending the ideas of agile and lean software development. It helps practitioners and researchers keep track of their common research collaboration goal: a scientifically enriched software product which fulfills the needs of the practitioner's business model. This approach gives first-class status to application-oriented metrics that measure progress and success of a research collaboration continuously. Those metrics are derived from the collaboration requirements and help to focus on a commonly defined goal. An appropriate tool set evaluates and visualizes those metrics with minimal effort, and all participants will be pushed to focus on their tasks with appropriate effort. Thus project status, challenges and progress are transparent to all research collaboration members at any time.