Shared Understanding of the User Experience : A Case Study of Collaboration Between Developers and Designers

User experience has become vital for many software development projects but the software development methods and tools are not originally intended for it. Moreover, software development is fundamentally complex and an increasingly social profession. This shift towards designing for user experience as a diverse group has brought new challenges to software development. The objective of this study is to find how developers and designers form a shared understanding of the software system UX under development. Central theme are the activities of UX work: what are the methods in use (e.g. User-Centered Design, Agile) and how do they work in practice, that is, what kind of information developers and designers share and what kind of artifacts do they produce in collaboration. This study answers two research questions: (RQ1) How do developers and designers form a shared understanding of the software system UX under development; and (RQ2) What are the artifacts utilized in their collaboration. To answer the research questions, a single case study research was conducted by interviewing the employees of a Finnish startup company. The company develops enterprise resource planning software (ERP) for rental businesses. The results show that shared understanding of the UX is achieved with UX activities throughout the system’s lifecycle where the user participation is required from the beginning of new software development. Furthermore, the artifacts in combination with developers’ participation in some of the UX activities will convey the design intent to the implemented software

Agile requirements work in a digital transformation project: Managing diverse and dispersed user needs

Successful requirements engineering is vital to the success of software projects. Agile software development seeks to limit the risk of misunderstanding requirements by emphasizing evolutionary delivery and more end-user involvement. But what happens when features are not accepted because the customers cannot agree among themselves? In this paper we report on an ongoing study where a software development company is creating a software system from scratch for a complex, diverse, and dispersed customer organization. We describe our ongoing study in which we follow a feature of the software system from idea to implementation. We attempt to explain our observations through three theoretical lenses: User participation and involvement, power relations in complex organizations, and balancing of local and global needs in system development

User-developer cooperation in software development: building common ground and usable systems

PhDThe topic of this research is direct user participation in the task based development of interactive software systems. Building usable software demands understanding and supporting users and their tasks. Users are a primary source of usability requirements and knowledge, since users can be expected to have intimate and extensive knowledge of themselves, their tasks and their working environment. Task analysis approaches to software development encourage a focus on supporting users and their tasks while participatory design approaches encourage users' direct, active contributions to software development work. However, participatory design approaches often concentrate their efforts on design activities rather than on wider system development activities, while task analysis approaches generally lack active user participation beyond initial data gathering. This research attempts an integration of the strengths of task analysis and user participation within an overall software development process. This thesis also presents detailed empirical and theoretical analyses of what it is for users and developers to cooperate, of the nature of user-developer interaction in participatory settings. Furthennore, it operationalises and assesses the effectiveness of user participation in development and the impact of user-developer cooperation on the resulting software product. The research addressed these issues through the development and application of an approach to task based participatory development in two real world development projects. In this integrated approach, the respective strengths of task analysis and participatory design methods complemented each other's weaker aspects. The participatory design features encouraged active user participation in the development work while the task analysis features extended this participation upstream from software design activities to include analysis of the users' current work situation and design of an envisioned work situation. An inductive analysis of user-developer interaction in the software development projects was combined with a theoretical analysis drawing upon work on common ground in communication. This research generated an account of user-developer interaction in terms of the joint construction of two distinct fonns of common ground between user and developer: common ground about their present joint development activities and common ground about the objects of those joint activities, work situations and software systems. The thesis further extended the concept of common ground, assessing user participation in terms of contributions to common ground developed through the user-developer discourse. The thesis then went on to operationalise and to assess the effectiveness of user participation in tenns of the assimilation of users' contributions into the artefacts of the development work. Finally, the thesis assessed the value of user participation in tenns of the impact of user contributions to the development activities on the usability of the software produced.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Harlequin Software Grou

Agile methods in Ethiopia : an empirical study

This paper provides empirical evidence of agile method adoption in smaller companies in Ethiopia. Agile methods are emerging as best practice for software development in the global north. So, is there evidence that agile methods are being used in Ethiopia? A Grounded Theory approach was adopted using face-to-face interviews with 17 software professionals from 7 software companies, which were selected by using a snowball sampling technique. The interviews were semi-structured and open-ended and have been audio-recorded and transcribed. Participants in the study identified the importance of agile principles, values and practices. Agile practices are used to address issues with requirements and to encourage user participation. However, it was discovered that the companies in the study were conducting software projects for government clients that mandate substantial documentation with elaborate staged approval procedures, using fixed price contracts with predefined delivery schedules

Using Agile Practice for Student Software Projects

Agile methodology as a relatively new approach to software engineering is becoming more popular in both industry and academia. Learning agile software development methodologies will unquestionably increase the capabilities and competences of our students as entry-level software engineers. However, how agile methods and techniques should be taught at the undergraduate level in additional to traditional approaches is still being debated. This study was conducted on a studentprogramming project, with sample size of 23 students from the Informatics Engineering course. The Scrum methodology was adopted and 28 user stories and 4 sprints were created. The results indicate a significant impact on students’ skill improvement and let them to have the first contact with real projects and clients. Besides that, the students agree that the adoption of the Scrum methodology helped them to improve the participation and collaboration. However, some issues were also detected in terms of communication and tasks planning. Therefore, we proposed some polities that could help and boost the software development process inside a classroom

Participatory worlds: models of collaborative textual production beyond the entertainment industry.

Throughout history, participation has been a term closely related to transgression and the democratisation and the balance of the inequalities in society. Participation has continued being a major concept in the digital age where 'participatory culture', a culture where audiences get the framework, knowledge and tools to take part in the creation and production of content, has becoming more popular and visible than ever before. Co-creation practices between producers and consumers (also known as value co-creation or co-creation of value) has been seen for many academics, gurus and organizations as a way to generate industrial innovation in the near future. Software development and testing, ‘modding’, knowledge exchange and participatory journalism are areas where user participation has been applied successfully. However, there are other disciplines where co-creation practices have seen very little improvement within the industry. This is the case of narrative contributions to story-worlds. Entertainment industries, IP owners of the most popular franchises, generally keep a strict control over their fictional worlds and user participation may only be considered as a part of a marketing strategy, market research and customer feedback. Even when channels for participation exist (for example, in the form of a contest), narrative contributions created by fans are merely treated as fan-fiction. In contrast, projects based on participatory story-worlds allow audiences to contribute canonically to the fictional world. Generally supported by independent ventures, the nature of these projects transgress the mainstream, going beyond the rules and conventions established by the industry. However, participatory worlds also keep ties with entertainment industries and with their practices, platforms and conventions. This dual relationship with the mainstream places participatory worlds in the margins of the norm. This paper attempts to bring to light this relationship and demonstrate that participatory worlds are situated both ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the system

Characterizing User Behaviors in Open-Source Software User Forums: An Empirical Study

User forums of Open Source Software (OSS) enable end-users to collaboratively discuss problems concerning the OSS applications. Despite decades of research on OSS, we know very little about how end-users engage with OSS communities on these forums, in particular, the challenges that hinder their continuous and meaningful participation in the OSS community. Many previous works are developer-centric and overlook the importance of end-user forums. As a result, end-users' expectations are seldom reflected in OSS development. To better understand user behaviors in OSS user forums, we carried out an empirical study analyzing about 1.3 million posts from user forums of four popular OSS applications: Zotero, Audacity, VLC, and RStudio. Through analyzing the contribution patterns of three common user types (end-users, developers, and organizers), we observed that end-users not only initiated most of the threads (above 96% of threads in three projects, 86% in the other), but also acted as the significant contributors for responding to other users' posts, even though they tended to lack confidence in their activities as indicated by psycho-linguistic analyses. Moreover, we found end-users more open, reflecting a more positive emotion in communication than organizers and developers in the forums. Our work contributes new knowledge about end-users' activities and behaviors in OSS user forums that the vital OSS stakeholders can leverage to improve end-user engagement in the OSS development process.Comment: 15th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Softare Engineerin

The usability of open source software: analysis and prospects

Open source communities have successfully developed many pieces of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open-source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability

Usability and open source software.

Open source communities have successfully developed many pieces of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open-source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability

Clients’ participation in software projects: comparative case study between an agile and a ‘traditional’ software company

One of the main characteristics of agile software development is the active and continuous participation and involvement of the clients throughout the project. According to agile proponents, this leads to building ‘the right’ product and to satisfied clients. In this paper we present a comparative study of two Dutch software development companies in respect to client participation and its impact on the project. One of the companies is purely agile while the other is following a traditional software development approach. Our study suggests that active clients’ participation is not an exclusive attribute of agile projects and that it can be successfully integrated (and implemented) in a traditional project as well. Further, the study shows that by involving clients, software companies have the chance to get higher customer satisfaction, regardless whether or not they implement agile software development processes. Although our study is not quantitative, we think that it is indicative about the impact of the factor “client’s participation” on the client’s satisfaction