Abstract
HCI and CSCW research as well as practice has strongly indicated the value of integrating (end) users in software development processes. Such integration can help address actual needs and wants, to avoid undesirable developments and to strengthen the User Experience of a product. A user-focused approach to software development has some conceptual overlap with agile software development practices, such as quick and iterative (user) testing. However, out in the wild, organisations seem to have difficulties actually mapping user-centered development with agile processes for a variety of reasons ranging from organisational or hierarchical aspects up to financial issues. This problem seems specially prevalent in Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) where such constraints can be even tighter than in larger organisations. To help understand those problems and to identify possible solutions, we turned to three quite different German software SMEs, varying in size, market focus and organisational structure. By way of qualitative field studies, we were able to identify key roles and tools as well as methodological, organisational and analytical practices and challenges in integrating (end) users into agile software development.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
From here on, we will abbreviate “Usability and User Experience” as UUX. For the purpose of this chapter, we do not need the distinction between more task-focused and more ludic aspects.
- 2.
All organisation names as well as all personal names in this contribution are anonymised for privacy reasons.
- 3.
To be clear: Foo’s support team is the user support department, i.e. the staff responsible for helping customers with issues. The name ‘support team’ is actually an in-vivo code from the fieldwork at Foo.
- 4.
At this point in the analytical process, it had already become clear that the intersection of those two topics would be central to our study.
- 5.
This is actually an in-vivo code. A PO at Foo used those exact words.
- 6.
Terminology taken from the interviews – a ‘call’ should be understood as any kind of communication with users, not just telephone calls.
- 7.
An example might be Living Labs as a service, see e.g. [20].
- 8.
As in outside of sprints and their – by definition – extreme focus.
- 9.
An attempt at an explicitly simple and lean user feedback system similar to what Qux wished for is currently being developed open source led by our research group. It is called ‘Shake’ and interested parties are welcome to try it out and/or contribute on http://github.com/UniSiegenCSCW/Shake.
- 10.
However, please keep in mind that those suggestions are grounded in literature and three essentially qualitative case studies. They can make no claim to completeness or applicability in all but we believe they are helpful in many.
References
Anderson DJ, Reinertsen DG (2010) Kanban: successful evolutionary change for your technology business. Blue Hole Press, Sequim
Beck K, Beedle M, Van Bennekum A, Cockburn A, Cunningham W, Fowler M, Grenning J, Highsmith J, Hunt A, Jeffries R, Kern J, Marick B, Martin RC, Mellor S, Schwaber K, Sutherland J, Thomas D (2001) Agile manifesto. http://agilemanifesto.org/
Beyer H (2010) User-centered agile methods. In: Carrol JM (ed) Synthesis lectures on human-centered informatics, vol 3, pp 1–71
Bratteteig T, Bjerknes G (1995) User participation and democracy: a discussion of Scandinavian research on system development. Scand J Inf Syst 7(1):73–98
Braun V, Clarke V (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qual Res Psychol 3:77–101
Chamberlain S, Sharp H, Maiden N (2006) Towards a framework for integrating agile development and user-centred design. In: Extreme programming and agile processes in software engineering, Oulu, vol 4044, pp 143–153
Dax J, Ludwig T, Meurer J, Pipek V, Stein M, Stevens G (2015) FRAMES – a framework for adaptable mobile event-contingent self-report studies. In: Diaz P, Pipek V, Ardito C, Jensen C, Aedo I, Boden A (eds) End-user development. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 9083. Springer, Cham, pp 141–155
Draxler S, Stickel O, Winter D, Stevens G (2014) Nutzerintegration in softwareprojekte durch multi-channel feedback. In: Butz A, Koch M, Schlichter J (eds) Mensch & computer 2014 – Tagungsband. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin, pp 175–184
Ehn P, Kyng M (1987) The collective resource approach to system design. In: Kyng M, Bjerknes G, Ehn P (eds) Computers and democracy: a Scandinavian challenge. Avebury, Brookfield, pp 17–57
Ferreira J, Noble J, Biddle R (2007) Agile development iterations and UI design. In: Proceedings of the AGILE 2007, AGILE ’07. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, pp 50–58
Floyd C, Mehl WM, Reisin FM, Schmidt G, Wolf G (1989) Out of Scandinavia: alternative approaches to software design and system development. Hum-Comput Interact 4(4):253–350
Floyd C, Reisin FM, Schmidt G (1989) STEPS to software development with users. In: ESEC ’89: proceedings of the 2nd European software engineering conference. Springer, London, pp 48–64
Hansson C, Dittrich Y, Randall D (2006) How to include users in the development of off-the-shelf software: a case for complementing participatory design with agile development. In: Proceedings of the 39th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences, HICSS ’06, Kauai, vol 8, pp 175c–175c
Hering D, Kraft X, Schwartz T, Wulf V (2013) Usability-Hindernisse bei Software entwickelnden KMU. In: Boll S, MaaßS, Malaka R (eds) Mensch & computer 2013 – Workshopband, pp 9–18. Oldenbourg Verlag, München
Holtzblatt K, Beyer H (1993) Making customer-centered design work for teams. Commun ACM 36(10):92–103
Isomursu M, Sirotkin A, Voltti P, Halonen M (2012) User experience design goes agile in lean transformation – a case study. In: 2012 agile conference, Dallas, pp 1–10
Keiningham TL, Cooil B, Andreassen TW, Aksoy L (2007) A longitudinal examination of net promoter and firm revenue growth. J Market 71(3):39–51
Larusdottir M, Cajander A, Gulliksen J, Cockton G, Gregory P, Salah D (2014) On the integration of user centred design in agile development. In: Proceedings of the 8th Nordic conference on human-computer interaction, NordiCHI ’14. ACM, New York, pp 817–820
Lee JC (2006) Embracing agile development of usable software systems. In: CHI ’06 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems, CHI EA ’06. ACM, New York, pp 1767–1770
Ley B, Ogonowski C, Mu M, Hess J, Race N, Randall D, Rouncefield M, Wulf V (2014) At home with users: a comparative view of living labs. Interact Comput 27:21–35
Lievesley MA, Yee JSR (2006) The role of the interaction designer in an agile software development process. In: CHI ’06 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems, CHI EA ’06. ACM, New York, pp 1025–1030
Muller M, Haslwanter J, Dayton T (1997) Participatory practices in the software lifecycle. In: Helander M, Landauer T, Prabhu P (eds) Handbook of human-computer interaction. Elsevier, Amsterdam/New York, pp 256–297
Pipek V, Wulf V (2009) Infrastructuring: towards an integrated perspetive on the design and use of information technology. J Assoc Inf Syst 10(5):447–473
Reichheld FF (2003) The one number you need to grow. Harv Bus Rev 81(12):46–54
Schwaber K (1995) SCRUM development process. In: Proceedings of the 10th annual ACM conference on object oriented programming systems, languages, and applications (OOPSLA), Austin, pp 117–134
Silva T, Silveira MS, Maurer F, Hellmann T (2012) Paulo: user experience design and agile development: from theory to practice. J Softw Eng Appl 5:743–751
Singh M (2008) U-SCRUM: an agile methodology for promoting usability. In: Proceedings of the agile 2008, AGILE ’08. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, pp 555–560
Strauss A, Corbin J (2008) Basics of qualitative research grounded theory procedures and techniques. SAGE Publications, Los Angeles
Sy D (2007) Adapting usability investigations for agile user-centered design. J Usability Stud 2:112–132
von Hippel E (2005) Democratizing innovation. MIT, Cambridge
Williams L, Cockburn A (2003) Agile software development: it’s about feedback and change. Computer 36(6):39–43
Wulf V, Rohde M (1995) Towards an integrated organization and technology development. In: Symposium on designing interactive systems (DIS’95). ACM, Ann Arbor, pp 55–64
Wulf V, Rohde M, Pipek V, Stevens G (2011) Engaging with practices: design case studies as a research framework in CSCW. In: Proceedings of the ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. ACM, New York/Hangzhou, pp 505–512
Yetim F, Draxler S, Stevens G, Wulf V (2012) Fostering continuous user participation by embedding a communication support tool in user interfaces. AIS Trans Hum-Comput Interact 4(2):153–168
Acknowledgements
We thank all employees of three SMEs who participated in this study. This contribution has been funded by the German BMWi (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy) though the projects CUBES (FKZ: 01MU14001A) and SmartLive (FKZ: 01MU12026A).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stickel, O., Ogonowski, C., Jakobi, T., Stevens, G., Pipek, V., Wulf, V. (2016). User Integration in Agile Software Development Processes: Practices and Challenges in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises. In: Cockton, G., Lárusdóttir, M., Gregory, P., Cajander, Å. (eds) Integrating User-Centred Design in Agile Development. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32165-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32165-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-32163-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-32165-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)