Inoculating an agile company with user-centred design: an empirical study

We present an empirical study on facilitating the adoption of user-centred design (UCD) in small Agile companies. To this end, we introduced a curated set of qualitative design practices in an Agile organisation, engaging developers in a lightweight series of workshops. Our results suggest that the approach followed enhanced internal communication and promoted a concrete shift towards a more user-centred perspective. However, the presence of a predominant non-Agile customer seems to have limited potential benefits. © The Author(s) 2017

Semantic Bridging between Conceptual Modeling Standards and Agile Software Projects Conceptualizations

Software engineering benefitted from modeling standards (e.g. UML, BPMN), but Agile Software Project Management tends to marginalize most forms of documentation including diagrammatic modeling, focusing instead on the tracking of a project\u27s backlog and related issues. Limited means are available for annotating Jira items with diagrams, however not on a granular and semantically traceable level. Business processes tend to get lost on the way between process analysis (if any) and backlog items; UML design decisions are often disconnected from the issue tracking environment. This paper proposes domain-specific conceptual modeling to obtain a diagrammatic view on a Jira project, motivated by past conceptualizations of the agile paradigm while also offering basic interoperability with Jira to switch between environments and views. The underlying conceptualization extends conceptual modeling languages (BPMN, UML) with an agile project management perspective to enrich contextual traceability of a project\u27s elements while ensuring that data structures handled by Jira can be captured and exposed to Jira if needed. Therefore, concepts underlying the typical software development project management are integrated with established modeling concepts and tailored (with metamodeling means) for the domain-specificity of agile project management. A Design Science approach was pursued to develop a modeling method artifact, resulting in a domain-specific modeling tool for software project managers that want to augment agile practices and enrich issue annotation

Artifacts for Agile User-Centered Design: A Systematic Mapping

Abstract—The integration of Agile and User-Centered Design methods is a fundamental condition to improve the quality of software products. However, one of the main problems faced to establish this integration on a day-to-day basis is how to improve communication among the invariably distinct involved teams. We believe that the artifacts involved in the development process could be used to support and increase teams’ communication. To better understand this scenario, we performed a systematic mapping study on artifacts and their role in the communication between Agile and User-Centered Design fields. Through the analysis of 56 papers dealing with this specific topic, we present the artifacts used for communication in these approaches and software development events when they are used. The analyzed studies reinforced our beliefs about the importance of artifacts to improve teams’ communication

Using human factors standards to support user experience and agile design

The ISO 9241-210 standard provides a framework for human-centred design (HCD) activities comprising the four stages: context of use, specification of user and organisational requirements, design solutions, and evaluation against requirements. Other parts of the 9241 standard cover user interface design and usability. This paper uses the HCD framework to emphasise user experience (UX) design and methods used to help create good user experiences. It also relates the framework to an agile software development environment. It is concluded that the flexible and iterative nature of ISO 9241-210 makes it a good basis for both user experience design and an agile development process

A systematic mapping study on integration proposals of the personas technique in agile methodologies

Agile development processes are increasing their consideration of usability by integrating various user‐centered design techniques throughout development. One such technique is Personas, which proposes the creation of fictitious users with real preferences to drive application design. Since applying this technique conflicts with the time constraints of agile development, Personas has been adapted over the years. Our objective is to determine the adoption level and type of integration, as well as to propose improvements to the Personas technique for agile development. A systematic mapping study was performed, retrieving 28 articles grouped by agile methodology type. We found some common integration strategies regardless of the specific agile approach, along with some frequent problems, mainly related to Persona modelling and context representation. Based on these limitations, we propose an adaptation to the technique in order to reduce the creation time for a preliminary persona. The number of publications dealing with Personas and agile development is increasing, which reveals a growing interest in the application of this technique to develop usable agile softwareThis research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities research grant PGC2018-097265-B-I00, MASSIVE project (RTI2018-095255-B-I00) and by EIT-Health, grant number 19091 (POSITIVE project). This research was also supported by the Madrid Region R&D programme (project FORTE, P2018/TCS-4314

Development and usability evaluation of a nutrition and lifestyle guidance application for people living with and beyond cancer

There is a need to provide accessible information for health care professionals and for people living beyond treatment. Mobile and digital health technologies provide an ideal platform to access diet and nutrition guidance that is both trusted and evidence-based and so that people know how to alter and monitor eating patterns and behaviours to improve the quality of life. Participatory design and usability evaluation approaches have been utilised to develop a nutrition and lifestyle guidance smartphone application for both people living with and beyond cancer, and for health care professionals involved in advising such patients. The challenges centred on the design, development and evaluation of the first version of a new mobile application named ‘Life Beyond’ are presented. This proof of concept application aims to centralise evidence-based nutrition and lifestyle guidance for those living beyond cancer. It enables users to obtain guidance and information, create and track nutrition and activity related goals and track their progress in the completion of these goals. Consistent feedback from participatory design and usability evaluations drove this research and helped to create an initial solution that met the user expectations. The System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 67.69 denotes an ‘average’ usability and hence further development. More research of extensive end user engagement is needed before an optimal solution is disseminated