Participatory Design Activities and Agile Software Development

This paper contributes to the studies of design activities in information systems development. It provides a case study of a large agile development project and focusses on how customers and users participated in agile development and design activities in practice. The investigated project utilized the agile method eXtreme Programming. Planning games, user stories and story cards, working software, and acceptance tests structured the customer and user involvement. We found genuine customer and user involvement in the design activities in the form of both direct and indirect participation in the agile development project. The involved customer representatives played informative, consultative, and participative roles in the project. This led to their functional empowerment— the users were enabled to carry out their work to their own satisfaction and in an effective, efficient, and economical manner.