Achieving Usability: Looking for Connections between User-Centred Design Practices and Resultant Usability Metrics in Agile Software Development

This article searches for correlations between the practices of usability professionals from software development teams and the resulting usability of the system they are working on. After reviewing the literature of the past decade, we can conclude that most researchers try to achieve better usability with process proposals, but measurements focus on perceived usability. The level of involvement of users in the requirements capture phase is unclear. There is a trend to reduce costs of usability engineering, either by choosing more lightweight and informal methods or by trying to substitute user involvement. Looking at decade's worth of 452 articles about "agile AND usability" in Scopus, we selected 133 which deal with the integration of usability, UX and User Centred Design practices and Agile development

Agile Requirements Engineering: A systematic literature review

Nowadays, Agile Software Development (ASD) is used to cope with increasing complexity in system development. Hybrid development models, with the integration of User-Centered Design (UCD), are applied with the aim to deliver competitive products with a suitable User Experience (UX). Therefore, stakeholder and user involvement during Requirements Engineering (RE) are essential in order to establish a collaborative environment with constant feedback loops. The aim of this study is to capture the current state of the art of the literature related to Agile RE with focus on stakeholder and user involvement. In particular, we investigate what approaches exist to involve stakeholder in the process, which methodologies are commonly used to present the user perspective and how requirements management is been carried out. We conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with an extensive quality assessment of the included studies. We identified 27 relevant papers. After analyzing them in detail, we derive deep insights to the following aspects of Agile RE: stakeholder and user involvement, data gathering, user perspective, integrated methodologies, shared understanding, artifacts, documentation and Non-Functional Requirements (NFR). Agile RE is a complex research field with cross-functional influences. This study will contribute to the software development body of knowledge by assessing the involvement of stakeholder and user in Agile RE, providing methodologies that make ASD more human-centric and giving an overview of requirements management in ASD.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Enterprise Experience into the Integration of Human-Centered Design and Kanban

he integration of Human-Centered Design (HCD) and Agile Software Development (ASD) promises the development of competitive products comprising a good User Experience (UX). This study has investigated the integration of HCD and Kanban with the aim to gain industrial experiences in a real world context. A case study showed that requirements flow into the development process in a structured manner by adding a design board. To this end, the transparency concerning recurring requirements increased. We contribute to the body of knowledge of software development by providing practical insights into Human-Centered Agile Development (HCAD). On one hand, it is shown that the integration of HCD and Kanban leads to a product with a good UX and makes the development process more human-centered. On the other hand, we conclude that a cross-functional collaboration speeds up product development.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

An Investigation into Mobile Based Approach for Healthcare Activities, Occupational Therapy System

This research is to design and optimize the high quality of mobile apps, especially for iOS. The objective of this research is to develop a mobile system for Occupational therapy specialists to access and retrieval information. The investigation identifies the key points of using mobile-D agile methodology in mobile application development. It considers current applications within a different platform. It achieves new apps (OTS) for the health care activities

Identifying Agile Requirements Engineering Patterns in Industry

Agile Software Development (ASD) is gaining in popularity in today´s business world. Industry is adopting agile methodologies both to accelerate value delivery and to enhance the ability to deal with changing requirements. However, ASD has a great impact on how Requirements Engineering (RE) is carried out in agile environments. The integration of Human-Centered Design (HCD) plays an important role due to the focus on user and stakeholder involvement. To this end, we aim to introduce agile RE patterns as main objective of this paper. On the one hand, we will describe our pattern mining process based on empirical research in literature and industry. On the other hand, we will discuss our results and provide two examples of agile RE patterns. In sum, the pattern mining process identifies 41 agile RE patterns. The accumulated knowledge will be shared by means of a web application.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Requirements engineering related usability techniques adopted in agile development processes

Over the last decade there has been a growing interest in the integration of agile software development process (ASDP) and user-centred design (UCD). However, there are no papers that study which usability techniques related to requirements engineering are being adopted in the ASDP, and there are no formalized proposals for their adoption. Objective: Identify which techniques related to requirements engineering activities are being adopted in the ASDP and determine how they are being adopted. Method: We have conducted a systematic mapping study (SMS) to retrieve the literature reporting the application of usability techniques in the ASDP. We analysed these techniques using a catalogue of techniques compiled by software engineering researchers. We then determined the manner in which the techniques that are being used in the ASDP were adopted. Results: The agile community is very much interested in adopting usability techniques. The most used techniques are Personas, contextual inquiry and prototyping. Conclusions: This research offers an overview of the adoption of usability techniques related to requirements engineering in ASDPs and reports how they are being adopted. We found that some of the techniques are being adapted for adoption.This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports FLEXOR and “Realizando Experimentos en la Industria del Software: Comprensión del Paso de Laboratorio a la Realidad” projects (TIN2014-52129-R and TIN2014-60490-P, respectively) and the eMadrid-CM “Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías Educativas en la Comunidad de Madrid” project (S2013/ICE-2715

Use of an agile bridge in the development of assistive technology

Engaging with end users in the development of assistive technologies remains one of the major challenges for researchers and developers in the field of accessibility and HCI. Developing usable software systems for people with complex disabilities is problematic, software developers are wary of using user-centred design, one of the main methods by which usability can be improved, due to concerns about how best to work with adults with complex disabilities, in particular Severe Speech and Physical Impairments (SSPI) and how to involve them in research. This paper reports on how the adoption of an adapted agile approach involving the incorporation of a user advocate on the research team helped in meeting this challenge in one software project and offers suggestions for how this could be used by other development teams

The Contemporary Understanding of User Experience in Practice

User Experience (UX) has been a buzzword in agile literature in recent years. However, often UX remains as a vague concept and it may be hard to understand the very nature of it in the context of agile software development. This paper explores the multifaceted UX literature, emphasizes the multi-dimensional nature of the concept and organizes the current state-of-the-art knowledge. As a starting point to better understand the contemporary meaning of UX assigned by practitioners, we selected four UX blogs and performed an analysis using a framework derived from the literature review. The preliminary results show that the practitioners more often focus on interaction between product and user and view UX from design perspective predominantly. While the economical perspective receives little attention in literature, it is evident in practitioners writings. Our study opens up a promising line of request of the contemporary meaning of UX in practice.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 3 table

Agile values and their implementation in practice

Today agile approaches are often used for the development of digital products. Since their development in the 90s, Agile Methodologies, such as Scrum and Extreme Programming, have evolved. Team collaboration is strongly influenced by the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto. The values and principles described in the Agile Manifesto support the optimization of the development process. In this article, the current operation is analyzed in Agile Product Development Processes. Both, the cooperation in the project team and the understanding of the roles and tasks will be analyzed. The results are set in relation to the best practices of Agile Methodologies. A quantitative questionnaire related to best practices in Agile Product Development was developed. The study was carried out with 175 interdisciplinary participants from the IT industry. For the evaluation of the results, 93 participants were included who have expertise in the subject area Agile Methodologies. On one hand, it is shown that the collaborative development of product-related ideas brings benefits. On the other hand, it is investigated which effect a good understanding of the product has on decisions made during the implementation. Furthermore, the skillset of product managers, the use of pair programming, and the advantages of cross-functional teams are analyzed.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2013-46928-C3-3-