From Service-Orientation to Agile Development by Conceptually Linking Business IT Services and User Stories: A Meta-Model and a Process Fragment

IT services are being built by IT departments and other service providers to address the core technological requirements of organizations. Even if these services solve operational issues, their adoption - because of their internal behavior - has a sustaining or non-sustaining impact on the (long term) strategy of the organization. This impact is called the Business and IT alignment (BITA); as such, it is problematic to estimate before the development of the service without a view on its design. To be properly done, BITA evaluation indeed needs details about the service run-time behavior. Conversely, the agile wave refrains from a detailed upfront software design; functions providing high operational value to users are indeed selected and built for one sprint at a time. The mismatch between a traditional service approach and an agile way of development is therefore quite obvious. The present paper proposes a method (called Agile-MoDrIGo) to reconcile these two approaches. For this purpose, it (i) decomposes services into epic user stories under the scope of which (user-level built) user stories can be mapped (i.e. functional alignment) and (ii) links services as (coarse-grained) conceptual elements along with the strategic objectives they sustain to fine-grained user story functional elements for value-driven prioritization (i.e. strategic alignment). The proposal is presented in the form of a meta-model and supported by a process fragment; it is validated on a case study in healthcare.