An Empirical Study on Integrating Agile and User Centered Design

This paper discusses an empirical study that identified challenges exhibited by industrial practitioners in integrating Agile development processes and User Centred Design (UCD). The study also identified practices utilised in order to achieve the integration. Fourteen in-depth, one-to-one interviews were conducted with 14 participants from 11 companies of varying sizes in five different countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, Portugal, and Egypt. Those interviews covered a broad range of issues ranging from usability and UX goals to incorporating user feedback in Agile teams. The study revealed the existence of a set of challenges including: lack of management support to UCD activities, lack of allocated time for upfront activities, communication between the development team and UCD practitioners, conducting usability testing, absence of UCD practitioners or their increased work load, and lack of documentation. The study also revealed methods utilised by industrial practitioners to tackle some of these challenges via iteration 0, parallel tracks and lightweight documentation. Industrial practitioners can utilise the description of integration challenges and corresponding practices in identifying potential challenges and proposed practices to deal with these anticipated challenges.