Teaching Tornado: from communication models to releases

Abstract

In this paper we describe Tornado, which we teach in our software engineering project courses. Tornado is a new process model that combines the Unified Process with Scrum elements. The Tornado model focuses on scenario-based design starting with visionary scenarios funneling down to demo scenarios. Tornado offers models for a broad range of activities. In addition to formal models used for analysis and design, Tornado encourages the developer to use informal models as communication medium for the interaction with the customer and end user. These communication models can be used as the basis of early releases to increase the feedback from customer to developer. We argue that the combination of informal modeling and release management can be introduced early in software engineering project courses. We describe a case study in which we demonstrate the use of communication models and release management in a multi-customer course with 80 students. In three months, the students produced 163 releases for 11 customers.