Integrating Usability Practices into Agile Development: A Case Study

Within agile software development there is a growing concern with how development organizations can integrate usability work into agile practices. The concern occurs as frustration experienced in practice by agile developers and usability designers, and it also occurs as a gap in the research literature. With this paper we report from a case study in a software company that is committed to agile development, to usability work, and to their integration. The theoretical starting point is an initial framework that has been elicited from the research literature; and the paper’s contribution is an extension and modification of the initial framework based on our case study results. The resulting framework points to three enablers (attitudes, compromises, skills), three tasks (upfront design, low-fi prototyping, iterative evaluating), and three alternative modes of collaboration/work organization (parallel, embedded, fully integrated) in agile usability practices. In addition, end-user involvement may vary. The paper contributes by extending existing frameworks on integration and thus providing better explanations for practitioners and researchers of integration of usability.