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-

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

Development of a Shared UX Vision Based on UX Factors Ascertained Through Attribution

User experience (UX) is an important quality in differentiating products. For a product team, it is a challenge to develop a good positive user experience. A common UX vision for the product team supports the team in making goal-oriented decisions regarding the user experience. This paper presents an approach to developing a shared UX vision. This UX vision is developed by the product team while a collaborative session. To validate our approach, we conducted a first validation study. In this study, we conducted a collaborative session with two groups and a total of 37 participants. The group of participants comprised product managers, UX designers and comparable professional profiles. At the end of the collaborative session, participants had to fill out a questionnaire. Through questions and observations, we identified ten good practices and four bad practices in the application of our approach to developing a UX vision. The top 3 good practices mentioned by the participants include the definition of decision-making procedures (G1), determining the UX vision with the team (G2), and using general factors of the UX as a basis (G3). The top 3 bad practices are: providing too little time for the development of the UX vision (B1), not providing clear cluster designations (B2) and working without user data (B3). The results show that the present approach for developing a UX vision helps to promote a shared understanding of the intended UX in a quickly and simply way

Applicability of User Experience and Usability Questionnaires

To be successful, interactive products need to fulfil user expectations and create a positive user experience (UX). An established method to measure UX involves questionnaires. What we aim in this paper is to present a list of user experience and usability questionnaires and its applicability for different digital products. A total of 13 questionnaires on usability and UX were analysed for this paper, and 25 factors were extracted from those questionnaires. A study was conducted based on this collection of factors with N=61 students. The study investigated the perceived importance of usability and UX factors for seven digital products. The goal was to have a collection of usability and UX factors that could be combined for suitable products evaluation. The results of the study revealed that no questionnaire covered all the factors perceived important by the participants

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

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

A Benchmark for the UEQ+ Framework: Construction of a Simple Tool to Quickly Interpret UEQ+ KPIs

Questionnaires are a highly efficient method to compare the user experience (UX) of different interactive products or versions of a single product. Concretely, they allow us to evaluate the UX easily and to compare different products with a numeric UX score. However, often only one UX score from a single evaluated product is available. Without a comparison to other measurements, it is difficult to interpret an individual score, e.g. to decide whether a product’s UX is good enough to compete in the market. Many questionnaires offer benchmarks to support researchers in these cases. A benchmark is the result of a larger set of product evaluations performed with the same questionnaire. The score obtained from a single product evaluation can be compared to the scores from this benchmark data set to quickly interpret the results. In this paper, the first benchmark for the UEQ+ (User Experience Questionnaire +) is presented, which was created using 3.290 UEQ+ responses for 26 successful software products. The UEQ+ is a modular framework that contains a high number of validated user experience scales that can be combined to form a UX questionnaire. Currently, no benchmark is available for this framework, making the benchmark constructed in this paper a valuable interpretation tool for UEQ+ questionnaires

A Modeling Language for Agile Requirements Engineering

Agile methodologies have an impact on how organizations carry out Requirements Engineering (RE). In this context, organizations use different kind of agile techniques like artifacts, meetings, methods or roles, but there is a lack of specific guidelines for agile RE. The aim of this paper is to present a modeling language for supporting organizational aspects of agile RE. It allows the visualization of agile RE concepts and their relationships, which can be used to define guidelines for a specific organization, project or domain. The modeling language for agile RE is used in projects in industry and our experiences reveal that it supports organizations in detecting problems and visualizing internal conflicts during the agile requirements phase, among other benefits

Construction of UEQ+ scales for voice quality: measuring user experience quality of voice interaction

The UEQ+ is a modular framework for the construction of UX questionnaires. The researcher can pick those scales that fit his or her research question from a list of 16 available UX scales. Currently, no UEQ+ scales are available to allow measuring the quality of voice interactions. Given that this type of interaction is increasingly essential for the usage of digital products, this is a severe limitation of the possible products and usage scenarios that can be evaluated using the UEQ+. We describe in this paper the construction of three specific scales to measure the UX of voice interactions. Besides, we discuss how these new scales can be combined with existing UEQ+ scales in evaluation projects

Requirements for User Experience Management - A Tertiary Study

Today’s users expect to be able to interact with the products they own without much effort and also want to be excited about them. The development of a positive user experience must therefore be managed. We understand management in general as a combination of a goal, a strategy, and resources. When applied to UX, user experience management consists of a UX goal, a UX strategy, and UX resources. We conducted a tertiary study and examined the current state of existing literature regarding possible requirements. We want to figure out, what requirements can be derived from the literature reviews with the focus on UX and agile development. In total, we were able to identify and analyse 16 studies. After analysing the studies in detail, we identified different requirements for UX management. In summary, we identified 13 requirements. The most frequently mentioned requirements were prototypes and UX/usability evaluation. Communication between UX professionals and developers was identified as a major improvement in the software development process. In summary, we were able to identify requirements for UX management of People/Social, Technology/Artifacts, and Process/Practice. However, we could not identify requirements for UX management that enabled the development and achievement of a UX goal