Integrating Agile and User-Centered Design

Dina Salah, Mike Rawling
Academic Workshop

Summary

Agile User Centered Design Integration (AUCDI) is the practice of combining User Centered Design (UCD) with agile development processes. None of the existing agile processes explicitly include principles and practices for understanding and eliciting testable and verifiable usability and user experience requirements. Similarly, design practices for satisfying requirements for usability and user experience or practices for evaluating systems developed via agile processes for usability and user experience are generally absent. In addition, substantial differences exist between agile and UCD approaches which pose challenges to integration attempts. More specifically in regards to XP, it was criticized for being light on the user side of software and apparently is better used with non GUI intensive applications. Moreover, requirements engineering as an activity within XP was not explicitly defined. Furthermore, XP has no explicit process for dealing with interaction design thus the question of how to devise an initial design is largely unanswered. Although agile methods accentuate testing, and XP involves acceptance and unit testing, nevertheless, there is an absence of supportive practices for direct support of usability testing. As a result dealing with usability issues in XP is totally dependent on the expertise of the onsite customer. The aim of this workshop is to encourage academic and industrial attendees to share their research results and first-hand experience on agile and user centered design integration.

Organizers

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Dina Salah has been the program chair for the workshop “Agile and User Centered Design Integration Workshop – What Lies Beneath and What Lies Ahead (AUCDI 2013) that was hosted by the University of York’s Department of Computer Science(https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/AUCDI/). She is a final year PhD student at the University of York whose PhD is focused on Agile and User Centered Design integration. She has a number of posters and papers on the topic in the international conference on software engineering, international symposium of empirical software engineering, Annual BCS HCI Conference, and Irish HCI conference. Some of her relevant work include the following:
  1. Dina Salah and Richard Paige. A Framework for the Integration of Agile Software Development Processes and User Centered Design (AUCDI).6th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, Lund, Sweden, September 2012.
  2. Dina Salah, Richard Paige, Paul Cairns. Towards a Framework for Agile User Centered Design Integration. HCI 2012, Birmingham, UK, September 2012.
  3. Dina Salah. A Framework for the Integration of User Centered Design and Agile Software Development Processes. ICSE 2011: 1132-1133,Hawaii, USA, May 2011.
  4. Dina Salah, Richard Paige and Helen Petrie. Practices in the Integration of Agile and UCD Processes – A Reality Check. Agile 2010 – UX Session, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, August 2010.
  5. Dina Salah, Helen Petrie and Richard Paige. Towards a Framework for Bridging User- Centered Design and Agile Software Development Processes.3rd Irish HCI Conference 2009,Dublin, Ireland, September 2009.
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Mike Rawling is the Senior UX Engineer at Unruly Media, a social media video start-up.

Mike’s experience in UX and UI development dates back to 1998 and since then has explored new ways of more effectively realising the massive potential that software has and that each product starts with. He has consulted on, designed, engineered and led such teams and initiatives for Tesco, Wiley, Camelot, Konami, LoveFilm and Granada TV and is currently confirmed to talk at Agile On The Beach, UK.

Mike is @hedshot on Twitter.