Rebecca Pope-Ruark Conducts Summer Agile Research

The associate professor of English in the Professional Writing & Rhetoric concentration attended professional training and a conference this summer as part of a research agenda studying Agile project management.

Rebecca Pope-Ruark, associate professor of English in the Professional Writing & Rhetoric concentration, attended several professional training workshops and a professional conference this summer as part of a research agenda studying Agile project management practices. Supported by a CATL Scholars Fellowship and Summer Faculty Research and Development Fellowship, she participated in an Agile Coaching training workshop in Toronto, assisted the course facilitators during a similar training at a major RTP company, and attended Agile 2013, the primary conference for professional working in Agile environments.

Her summer research allowed her to understand the challenges of Agile for professionals in the trenches trying to adopt or champion this non-traditional, iterative, collaborative approach to work and project management. She collected informal interviews with Agile professionals and made contacts for a proposed book on the subject.

Pope-Ruark has been studying Agile project management strategies used in software development organizations for the last five years and adapting these collaborative strategies for service-learning courses, undergraduate research, and faculty professional development. Her work has been published in College Teaching and Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, with an article forthcoming in Technical Communication Quarterly.