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

User experience design and agile development : integration as an on-going achievement in practice

This research investigates how Agile development is combined with User Experience (UX) design. Agile development and UX design have roots in different disciplines and practitioners have to reconcile their perspectives on developing software if they are to work together. To date, there has been no sustained academic study on how Agile developers and UX designers work together in practical settings on a day-to-day basis. The ethnographically-informed research in this dissertation consists of three studies of teams in organisational settings, combined with an analysis of accounts of Agile development and UX design practice found in the literature. Together, they provide evidence for the complex, multifaceted nature of the work that integrates Agile development with UX design. The studies of day-to-day practice conducted for this research, found the work of the Agile developers and UX designers to be localised, contingent and purposeful. Agile devolopment and UX design integration, as it was achieved in the teams studied, was negotiated and achieved on a day-to-day basis between the developers and designers. The findings from the analysis of accounts of practice from the literature show that integration is achieved with the right tools, techniques and processes that coordinate between the tasks of the developers and designers and establish a focus on usability and on releasing working software. However, the accounts contain little and conflicting evidence for what constitutes the day-to-day work of Agile developers and UX designers in practical settings and as a result the utility of tools, techniques and processes for practice is not clear. Informed by the findings from the accounts in the literature and the studies of practice, five facets emerged as integral to an understanding of how the integration of Agile development and UX design is an on-going achievement in practice. These facets are (1) focus and coordination, (2) mutual awareness, (3) expectations about acceptable behaviour, (4) negotiating progress and (5) engaging with each other. The extent to which these facets enable integration, depend on contextual values concerning the combination of Agile development and UX design endorsed in the organisation. These findings serve to establish conditions which can constrain and enable Agile developers and UX designers in their integration work, while being sympathetic to the values embedded in the settings in which they work

Orchestrating the spatial planning process: from Business Process Management to 2nd generation Planning Support Systems

Metaplanning can be considered as a necessary step for improving collaboration, transparency and accountability in sustainable and democratic spatial decision-making process. This paper reports current findings on the operational implementation of the metaplanning concept developed by the authors relying on Business Process Management methods and techniques. Two solutions are presented which implement spatial planning process workflows thanks to the development of original spatial data and processing services connectors to a Business Process Management suite. These results can be considered as a first step towards the development of 2nd generation Planning Support Systems

Misaligned Values in Software Engineering Organizations

The values of software organizations are crucial for achieving high performance; in particular, agile development approaches emphasize their importance. Researchers have thus far often assumed that a specific set of values, compatible with the development methodologies, must be adopted homogeneously throughout the company. It is not clear, however, to what extent such assumptions are accurate. Preliminary findings have highlighted the misalignment of values between groups as a source of problems when engineers discuss their challenges. Therefore, in this study, we examine how discrepancies in values between groups affect software companies' performance. To meet our objectives, we chose a mixed method research design. First, we collected qualitative data by interviewing fourteen (\textit{N} = 14) employees working in four different organizations and processed it using thematic analysis. We then surveyed seven organizations (\textit{N} = 184). Our analysis indicated that value misalignment between groups is related to organizational performance. The aligned companies were more effective, more satisfied, had higher trust, and fewer conflicts. Our efforts provide encouraging findings in a critical software engineering research area. They can help to explain why some companies are more efficient than others and, thus, point the way to interventions to address organizational challenges.Comment: accepted for publication in Journal of Software: Evolution and Proces

Facilitating Quintuple helix innovation with urban living labs

This paper discusses the Urban Living Lab approach as a way to put the Quintuple Helix model for innovation into practice. In this analysis we focus on the concepts innovation democracy, ‘mode 3’ knowledge production, the innovation ecosystem as a system of societal subsystems and socioecological transition. The empirical analysis is performed by means of a multidimensional case study design, applied on a project-based ad hoc collaborative innovation development process in an ecological domain. The results of this paper provide theoretical foundations for Living Lab research, but also add to the practical understanding of the Quintuple Helix model for innovation, which often has a rather conceptual nature

Agile user stories enriched with usability

Usability is a critical quality factor. Therefore, like traditional software teams, agile teams have to address usability to properly catch their users experience. There exists an interesting debate in the agile and usability communities about how to achieve this integration. Our aim is to contribute to this debate by discussing the incorporation of particular usability recommendations into user stories, one of the most popular artifacts for communicating agile requirements. In this paper, we explore the implications of usability for both the structure of and the process for defining user stories. We discuss what changes the incorporation of particular usability issues may introduce in a user story. Although our findings require more empirical validation, we think that they are a good starting point for further research on this line

Building Bridges, Burning Bridges: The Use of Boundary Objects in Agile Distributed ISD Teams

Boundary objects are physical and abstract artefacts which support team interactions across diverse knowledge domains. Despite their relevancy, research into the effectiveness of boundary objects in agile distributed ISD remains nascent. In this paper, we develop a framework to theorize their effectiveness in generating cohesion within distributed teams. Our in-depth case study finds that their effectiveness is influenced by the nature of the boundary objects themselves but also by team members’ willingness to address differences in contextual factors. We identify three contextual factors - structure, identity, and culture - that are critical to supporting team members crossing knowledge boundaries within distributed teams. Furthermore, findings suggest that while boundary objects can indeed foster team cohesion in agile distributed ISD, there are other less explored aspects to their role. For example, we find that boundary objects can be useful for enabling constructive team conflict