A Systematic Literature Review for Agile Development Processes and User Centred Design Integration (original) (raw)

Patterns for Integrating Agile Development Processes and User Centred Design

The aim of this paper is to report the patterns that emerged as a result of conducting two studies: first, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that investigated Agile and User Centred Design Integration (AUCDI) challenges, strategies and success factors and included a total of 71 AUCDI experience reports, lessons learned, and success and failure AUCDI case studies. Second, an interview study that investigated challenges and practices faced by industrial AUCDI attempts. The patterns that emerged are related to various aspects of the integration process, for example, design, prioritizing User Centred Design (UCD) activities, usability testing, UCD practitioners, documentation and communication between the customer and the development team.

Integrating Agile and User Centred Design: A Literature Review

Software development businesses have increasingly adopted the popular Agile development process, a novel approach based on incremental and repeated iteration of system development life cycles in highly compressed timescales. It also discourages precisely defined initial plans in order to maximise its flexibility with regards to changing requirements and features, and focuses on functionality, which frequently produced deliverables are based on (Salah et al. 2014). Thus at first glance it might seem that Agile would not fit naturally with User Centred Design due to this overt emphasis on functionality and difference in resource allocation for developing UIs (Fox et al. 2008), which means that there is not enough time for other crucial components such as designing the actual software and trying to understand the users through user research and their work flows. Larusdottir et al. (2014) point out that one of Agile’s implicit assumptions was that because Agile addresses the perspectives of the user better than other traditional software processes, it therefore meant that systems would become usable for the user. Blomkvist (2006) states that Agile also does not have inherent support for user perspective development, and although both are based on iterative development, their form of iteration are different. Thus this significant lack of focus on the user on Agile projects clashes with UCD since the latter’s processes places the focus of the development process on the user instead, and the different forms of iteration may seem incompatible. However, this has not stopped various researchers on attempting integrating the two seemingly different approaches as an attempt to restore the user within Agile projects, and inversely, applying Agile to UCD to improve the process. Thus this literature review will discuss published works on Agile-UCD integration and will be structured as follows: a discussion of the inherent problems and challenges within implementing UCD, an evaluation of cases that apply UCD to Agile and Agile to UCD, an evaluation of the weaknesses in the discussed papers, and a conclusion that briefly summarises this review.

Towards a Framework for Integrating Agile Development and User-Centred Design

Extreme Programming and Agile …, 2006

Abstract. Due to a number of similarities between user-centred design (UCD) and agile development, coupled with an appreciation that developers are rarely usability experts, it seems attractive to integrate these two approaches. How-ever, although agile methods share ...

A three-fold integration framework to incorporate user–centered design into agile software development

Human Centered Design, 2011

We present a framework that incorporates user-centered design (UCD) philosophy into agile software development through a three-fold integration approach: at the process life-cycle level for the selection and application of appropriate UCD methods and techniques in the right places at the right times; at the iteration level for integrating UCD concepts, roles, and activities during each agile development iteration planning; and at the development-environment level for managing and automating the sets of UCD activities through ...