Integrating User-centred Design and Software Engineering: a Role for Extreme Programming?

The importance of integrating software engineering methods with HCI has been recognised for many years. Agile development is a new approach to software engineering that explicitly champions user involvement in the development process and presents a unique opportunity to bridge this gap. The agile manifesto specifically values customer collaboration, and eXtreme Programming (XP), probably the most popular agile method in the UK, stipulates that the customer should be 'on-site' with developers. Software engineers that practice XP value the input from the on-site customer, but they are not yet utilising techniques from HCI and user-centred design. This focus creates an ideal environment to integrate usercentred concerns of the HCI community with software engineering concerns. Universities have the opportunity to encourage this integration as XP is entering the software engineering curriculum, so that when new software engineering graduates enter the workplace they already recognise the value of user-centred design and HCI concerns.