Using the Scrum framework to develop a self-help pregnancy Android app – taken from (Davies & Mueller, 2020)

The scrum approach was used to develop an Android app to help women achieve a healthy weight during pregnancy.

Roles

The team consisted of 5 people who assumed multiple roles. The authors define the following roles:

  • Product Owner: This individual acted as a liaison between the customers, the project sponsors, and the development team, and was tasked with communicating the requirements of the project
  • Scrum Master: This individual was tasked with communicating the development goals to the team and with liaising between the product owners and the team. The scrum master also organised each sprint by assigning items from the product backlogs into the sprint backlogs, and assessed the team’s progress at the end of each week.
  • Application development team: This group was tasked with coding and testing the application.
  • User interface design team: This group was in charge of designing the look and feel of each individual screen of the application.

Product backlog

The team created a product backlog detailing the required components and functionalities of the application together with the customer. This included:

  • UI component: all screens and UI elements  
  • Notifications/reminders component: reminders for the user to input data into the app such as weight and activity
  • Weight monitoring component: a feature allowing the user to input and monitor their weight over time
  • Dietary information component: a feature allowing the users to input and monitor their food intake, as well as receiving feedback regarding the quality of their diet
  • Activity monitoring component: a component allowing users to input and monitor their activity levels
  • Google Health component: a component which interfaces with Google Health to enable the user to log weight, diet and activity information
  • Feedback component: a component which provides feedback to the user based on the information they inputted
  • Information library: a component containing information about food (e.g. portion sizes) and help screens
  • User manual: a component providing guidance on using the application

Meetings and progress tracking

The following mechanisms were implemented to facilitate planning and progress tracking:

  • Weekly meetings
  • Frequent communication between individual team members via telephone to track progress • Sprint planning meetings at the start of each sprint
  • Weekly meetings with the customers to assess the product backlog

Work plan and sprints

 The project spanned 21 weeks, split into three sets of seven-week terms:

  1. The first term involved background research and literature reviews on weight gain during pregnancy as well as requirements gathering from the customers
  2. The second term focused on software development and also involved conducting focus groups to facilitate the development of front-end components. It was split into three two-week sprints: Sprint 1 focused on the user interface and the notifications/reminder component; Sprint 2 and 3 focused on the weight tracking, nutrition tracking, and the activity tracking components
  3. The final term involved completing the coding of the application and polishing the user interface. This term was also split into three sprints: Sprint 1 focused on the feedback component, the Google Health component, and the information library; Sprint 2 focused on the feedback component and the information library, and Sprint 3 focused on bug fixes, polishing the user interface, and developing the user manual

 The team adapted the scrum approach to suit the aims and timelines of their project. Deviations from scrum included:

  • No scrum burn down chart to assess the completed work per day was created, due to limited time available to the scrum master (who was also part of the development team) and because the product backlog did not change much throughout the project
  • Weekly meetings were held instead of daily standup meetings (for the same reasons outlined above)
  • No sprint retrospective meetings were held due to time constraints

 

Using a Kanban approach in the development of a mobile app to promote a vegetarian diet - (Davies & Mueller, 2020)

A Kanban chart was used to manage the coding stage of the development of a mobile app to promote adoption of a vegetarian diet. The Kanban chart was created using Kanbanpad (a free online tool) and detailed the functional requirements of the app and tasks needed to accomplish these.

The project was managed by combining the Kanban chart with a Gantt chart. The Gantt chart provided an overview of the overall project and the higher-level tasks (e.g. “complete literature review” or “usability testing”) as well as their timelines. The Kanban chart on the other hand detailed smaller, more specific tasks (e.g. “Find studies on mobile nutrition tracking” or “Find participants for usability test”).

 

Example of an mHealth app – data collection examples

Radin, J. M., Steinhubl, S. R., Su, A. I., Bhargava, H., Greenberg, B., Bot, B. M., ... & Topol, E. J. (2018). The Healthy Pregnancy Research Program: transforming pregnancy research through a ResearchKit app. NPJ digital medicine, 1(1), 1-7.

NICE. (2019). Evidence standards framework for digital health technologies. https://www.nice.org.uk/Media/Default/About/what-we-do/our-programmes/evidence-standards-framework/digital-evidence-standards-framework.pdf

 

 

Last modified: Friday, 30 September 2022, 4:47 AM