Towards an Agile Requirements Engineering Process Combining HERMES 5 and SCRUM

The Swiss Federal Administration uses for its IT projects primarily the project management method HERMES 5, which has originally a sequential approach. With the introduction of the agile scenario ´customized IT application (agile)´ the Federal IT Steering Unit answered on the increasing demand for agile software development with SCRUM. HERMES 5 and SCRUM are different methods and there are general as well as topic-specific challenges involved in combining them. The focus of this research is on the requirements engineering discipline and investigates how the two methods HERMES 5 and SCRUM can be combined. As such, it provides an overview of discrepancies between the two frameworks that have to be resolved by many IT projects that want to take advantage of both methods and presents some solutions that potentially could be standardized and incorporated into upcoming HEMRES releases.