ACTIVITIES TAILORING WITHIN AGILE SCRUM ROLES: A CASE OF NIGERIAN HEALTHCARE INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

Salihu, Yazidu; Bass, Julian; Iyawa, Gloria

Abstract

Developing quality agile healthcare information systems requires understanding regulatory compliance and evolving healthcare needs through activities tailored within agile scrum roles. Agile scrum, a widely adopted philosophy, offers significant advantages in managing software development processes. This research explores how activities within the agile scrum roles are tailored to agile healthcare information systems development within the Nigerian context. This study adopted a qualitative case study methodology and interviewed 12 agile practitioners developing healthcare information systems within Nigeria using semi-structured open-ended interview guide questions. The practitioners were selected based on a snowballing process, a sunset of purposive sampling techniques from our network of experts. In this study, we used the data analysis techniques informed by the grounded theory, which includes open coding constant comparison, memoing, and theoretical saturation to analyse the data. We identified 33 tailored activities performed by the scrum roles comprising product owner, scrum master and self-organising development team. The activities include adherence to medical regulatory standards, clinical quality assurance testing, documentation, and healthcare knowledge sharing, which are specific for developing quality agile healthcare information systems in the Nigerian context. We systematically mapped the practices into four high-level memos that comprise Activities Tailoring for Healthcare Information Systems Development, Tailoring Activities Within the Product Owner’s Roles, Tailoring Activities within the Scrum Master’s Roles, and Tailoring Activities within the Self-organising Team Role, which are the descriptive theory emerged from the grounded theory conceptual data analysis process. Our primary contribution to this research is a detailed account of 33 tailored activities within Scrum roles and the memos presented, which are necessary for developing quality agile healthcare information systems software. Agile practitioners need more tailoring skills and adequate resources, local regulatory standards, data security infrastructures, and support from the government to deal with technical debt and issues with nonfunctional requirements.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 1, 2024
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jun 9, 2025
• Journal: Journal of International Technology and Information Management
• Print ISSN: 1543-5962
• Electronic ISSN: 1941-6679
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 33
• Issue: 1
• Article Number: 3
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.58729/1941-6679.1603