Incorporating Innovation into Iterative Software Development Using the Inventive Problem Solving Methodology

Iterative software methodologies allow development teams to be agile in their response to changing requirements. However, the software development team is usually at the mercy of requirements changes, rather than being part of the project engineering staff defining the changes to the solution architecture. Therefore, projects tend to implement inferior solutions. Integrating a project-level innovation technique called Inventive Problem Solving into agile software development methodologies such as the spiral model, the Rational Unified Process, and Scrum, allows the development team to affect the overall solution architecture utilizing their expertise in information technology to the maximum benefit. As a result, more creative, innovative, and efficient solutions to the problem are conceived and implemented.