User and Client Satisfaction in Agile Development

The emphasis on User Centred Design (UCD) in agile systems development processes (Agile) has been studied from various perspectives. The context of Agile strongly affects the possibilities for IT professionals to conduct user-centred activities in their work. In this paper, we describe a survey study comparing the responses from professionals using Agile processes and other software development processes. Specifically, we explore the values and perspectives that professionals emphasise in their work, whether feedback is gathered from stakeholders, and how frequently feedback is gathered. The main results show that both user and client satisfaction is emphasised by professionals using Agile, but for professionals using other processes such as their home-grown process or the traditional waterfall approach, the focus is user satisfaction. The survey involved a relatively small number of participants (N=42), and thus can be seen as an exploratory work that can inform our future work.