Integrating Usability into the Agile Development Process: A preliminary empirical study

Background: Interest in the integration of the agile software development process (ASDP) and user-centred design (UCD) has grown over the last decade. However, there are not many papers that study this issue holistically and uncover the current state of this integration. Aim: This study sets out to answer the following research question: What is the current state of integration between agile processes and usability? Method: We conduct a systematic mapping study (SMS). A SMS is a form of systematic literature review that aims to identify and classify the research papers published about a specified issue. Results: We retrieved a total of 161 primary studies, which we categorized according to four criteria: process, practice, team and technology integration. The largest group refers to process integration with a total of 76 primary studies. Judging by the increase in the number of publications over the last decade, the integration of human-computer interaction (HCI) activities and techniques into the ASDP is an issue of notable interest. Conclusions: There are very few papers that study the literature holistically and report the current state of usability in the ASDP. Additionally, there are no formalized proposals for adopting usability techniques in ASDP.

This chapter discusses the integration of ethical deliberations within agile software development processes. It emphasizes the importance of considering ethical implications during the development of software, not just AI. The chapter proposes modes of reflection and deliberation that include disclosive, weighing, and applicative modes of contemplation. It argues that these three kinds of thinking are guided by different normative values. The chapter suggests that agile development is an excellent starting point for implementing ethical deliberations, as it allows for continuous reflection and learning. It also proposes that development teams can perform this task themselves up to a point with proper guidance. This section further discusses the potential of agile processes to naturally accommodate ethical deliberation. However, it also acknowledges the challenges associated with implementing agile processes, especially in the context of machine learning models.

Agile development processes such as Scrum have been successfully applied in the software industry for many years. Based on experience, industrial practitioners indicate three predominant benefits of agile development processes compared to traditional software development processes. First of all, development results better fit customers’ and other stakeholders’ needs. That is because they are intensively involved in the development process by receiving, applying and assessing functional software increments in a defined cadence throughout the development process. Secondly, agile development processes better cope with unexpected changes in the development process due to the built-in process flexibility. Lastly, development speed has significantly increased in most of the agile software development projects, resulting in a shorter time-to-market. Especially in the context of radical innovations for technical systems, manufacturing companies are striving for approaches to optimize their development processes in a similar direction. Traditional plan-oriented development approaches such as VDI 2221 or Cooper’s Stage-Gate Process turn out to be insufficiently customer oriented, too inflexible and project duration is usually too long to reach an adequate time-to-market. For that reason, a large community in academia and industrial practice is developing and implementing approaches to adapt agile software development practices for the development of technical systems. However, a current study in industrial practice reveals that out of 23 objectives, that are expected when introducing agile development processes to technical systems, the three objectives mentioned above, show the largest negative deviations from expected benefit to realized benefit. Therefore, the overall goal of this research is to address these gaps by developing an explicit methodological approach for an agile development of technical systems. It turns out, that mainly the role of prototyping and the way product specifications are handled during the development process change significantly in the course of introducing agility to development of technical systems. Agile practitioners strive to not necessarily define product specifications comprehensively upfront, as it is postulated in plan-oriented development processes. In contrast, product specifications, which are of major importance to the overall development project, are specified and validated with customers and other stakeholders in early prototypes. Therefore, prototypes are realized in a defined cadence throughout the development process to gradually specify and validate the product. However, the way product specifications are prioritized and selected in the development of technical systems has to differ substantially from the general way Scrum or other existing agile development processes propose. That is because technical systems are characterized by multiple technical interrelations, resulting in informational dependencies for the development process. For that reason, a prioritization along criteria such as customer value, development effort and risk seems too narrow in the context of technical systems. In fact, the prioritization of product specifications has to consider both, the value being generated by their realization as well as the informational dependencies towards other specifications. Furthermore, when designing a prototype, time constraints need to be particularly considered due to lead times in parts delivery and prototype production. Therefore, this paper introduces a methodology to prioritize and select technical design parameters in agile development processes. The methodology can be applied in the cyclical sprint planning that aims at defining the scope of the next prototype to be developed. As outlined above, the major paradigms of value generation, informational dependencies as well as lead-time and effort are crucial when adapting agile for technical systems and are consequently implemented in the methodology. These paradigms are operationalized to explicitly address the mentioned major objectives of agile development processes, which are currently showing are large gap between expected benefit and realized benefit in industrial practice. The methodology is applied to the real development process of an RGB laser light source for digital cinema projectors, which is summarized as a case study in the paper. Insights from this application are equally discussed as the resulting next steps in further developing and aligning the methodology to the needs of industrial practice.

Abstract. CMMI is one of the most used models in the software industry to certify the quality of its processes and products, reduces or eliminates rework, increases product and process reuse, reduces costs due to multiple evaluations and process improvement programs. On the other hand, companies that develop software apply traditional models or agile models, which manage the software development process. They also apply development standards such as ISO/IEC 12207 as well as project portfolio management standards and project management standards. The purpose of this paper is to relate the traditional and agile software development processes, project portfolio management and PMBOK with the CMMI standard. The results of this work allow us to determine the aspects that are missing from these standards and the best practices to reach a high level of CMMI maturity. It is concluded that for a company it is important to apply both agile processes and traditional processes, as well as all the standards that contribute improving the management of its projects. None of these practices and norms are opposed to the CMMI process areas, but rather are complemented to achieve a high level of quality in the final product and in achieving the objectives of the company.

Agile processes are not a technology, not a science, not a product. They constitute a space somewhat hard to define. Agile methods, or more precisely agile software development methods or processes, are a family of approaches and practices for developing software systems. Any attempt to define them runs into egos and marketing posturing. For our purposes here, we can define this space in two ways: By enumeration. Pointing to recognizable members of the set: XP, scrum, lean development, DSDM, Crystal, FDD, Agile RUP or OpenUP, etc.

This position paper presents an emerging research based on a set of expressed statements and impressions from conducted empirical research during the past few years. Agile software development emphasizes on social aspects through its methods and principles. In order to improve the processes within the organization and amongst various stakeholders, there is a need for social processes and various types of interactions to be studied in the context of agile development. The objective of this paper is to present the need to conduct more empirical studies to investigate the socialness of software engineering processes and in particular the role of various type of social interactions in improving development processes and therefore creating more value in organizations.

The debate on how to integrate Design Thinking and Lean Startup into the agile process has been addressed in the literature over the past few years. Researchers argue that Design Thinking can contribute to software development by offering support on how to understand user needs in order to derive solution and product options, whereas Lean Startup helps to learn about business and scaling strategies. Based on these viewpoints, we developed InnoDev, which is an approach that combines Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Scrum to create an agile software development process that can deliver the innovative customer-oriented products and services required by competitive companies. This study aims to describe InnoDev in detail by depicting all its phases. Our findings provide complementary perspectives regarding software development strategies, roles and techniques. This study will advance the knowledge of Design Thinking and software development by providing a detailed description of a tool that combines best practices for creating more innovative software products. The results of this investigation can help managers to evaluate their software development process in order to improve its effectiveness and create more efficient user-driven solutions.

Empirical Validation of Neural Network Models for Agile Software Effort Estimation based on Story Points

This paper describes the testing approach for an object-oriented rich client application based on an agile software development process. The paper starts with an overview of project and the testing strategy being used. It then goes on to describe the test tools used in the project and the results achieved. The paper ends with a discussion of the discovered defects, their distribution and improvements for the testing process.

Despite of many criticisms, agile software development (Beck et al., Manifesto for Agile Software Development, http://agilemanifesto.org, [1]) philosophy has been proved to be quite successful to increase the project success rate up to a significant extent. The primary reasons behind the criticism of agile are the strong violation of the traditional disciplined software engineering theories, principles and practices. The goal of this research paper is to establish the fact that agility may also be achieved by following traditional process models especially with BRIDGE (Mandal, 2009 IEEE International Advance Computing Conference (IACC 2009) Patiala, India, [2]) process model. Hence, the aim of this paper is to integrate the agile and traditional disciplined software development process models and establish the compatibility between both the approaches. At the beginning, we have explored the objectives and principles of agile software development. Next, we briefly discussed the BRIDGE process model and further justified that--following BRIDGE process model, the philosophy of agile may also be achieved and conclude that BRIDGE model has both the capability of traditional software development process model as well as of the agile process.

Agile software development solutions are targeted at enhancing work at project level. Little is yet known about the relationship between agile projects and organizational capability improvement. The agile project teams are suggested to iteratively improve their behaviour in a validated manner. This paper addresses the high value of such validated software process improvement (SPI) knowledge emerging from project teams and its utilization at the organizational level SPI. In this paper it is suggested that the novel SPI methods of agile project teams also require alterations in the activities of the organizational level in order to enable the mutually benefiting coexistence of the two. Empirical results from a longitudinal case study over Jive software development projects are presented to illustrate the evolvement of organizational SPI mechanisms and to derive implications for integrating the agile software development and organizational SPI. This study reveals the high importance of close collaboration between the organizational and project levels throughout the projects and identifies several organizational activities needed in enhancing SPI within agile projects and in an organization.

The lack of user engagement, the absence of user feedback, incomplete and continuously changing user requirements are among the critical concerns that cause projects to fail. User-centered design (UCD) and agile software development are two iterative approaches that have been proposed to overcome such concerns. UCD is a design process focusing on user research, user interface design and usability evaluation. Introduced by software engineering practitioners, agile refers to a number of iterative and incremental software development practices that emphasize people’s needs, communication between developers and stakeholders and the ability to adapt to change. In both the agile and UCD communities, however, a full understanding of user requirements is often seen as incompatible with early and quick development iterations. We performed a literature review aiming to identify how agile teams have integrated UCD tools into their agile software development process to a better understanding of the user requirements without losing sight of the agile values and principles. UCD tools adaptations and minimal-up-front design applied in agile development are among the approaches discovered in this study. The findings could lead to a comprehensive user-centric software engineering that will overcome inherent problems faced by agile teams to understand user needs, priorities and goals.

Domain-Specific Languages: A Systematic Mapping Study

Analysis and validation using simulation is a helpful tool in systems engineering, but requires in-depth knowledge of various aspects of the system itself, the used model class(es), an appropriate software tool, and sometimes software engineering. Usually, this expertise is spread over a number of team members, and thus the development of a simulation-based system design tool is not a simple task. This paper presents a framework enabling the rapid development of extensible and reusable simulation-based applications. It supports an agile, iterative, evolutionary, and architecture-centric software development process. The design of the framework together with its components as well as the corresponding software development process is described. As an example, an environment for the configuration and analysis of wireless sensor network applications in the aeronautic domain is presented, which has been designed and implemented based on the proposed environment.

Context: Large-scale offshore software development programmes are complex, with challenging deadlines and a high risk of failure. Agile methods are being adopted, despite the challenges of coordinating multiple development teams. Agile processes are tailored to support team coordination. Artefacts are tangible products of the software development process, intended to ensure consistency in the approach of teams on the same development programme.Objective: This study aims to increase understanding of how development processes are tailored to meet the needs of large-scale offshore software development programmes, by focusing on artefact inventories used in the development process.Method: A grounded theory approach using 46 practitioner interviews, supplemented with documentary sources and observations, in nine international companies was adopted. The grounded theory concepts of open coding, memoing, constant comparison and saturation were used in data analysis.Results: The study has identified 25 artefacts, organised into five categories: feature, sprint, release, product and corporate governance. It was discovered that conventional agile artefacts are enriched with artefacts associated with plan-based methods in order to provide governance. The empirical evidence collected in the study has been used to identify a primary owner of each artefact and map each artefact to specific activities within each of the agile roles.Conclusion: The development programmes in this study create agile and plan-based artefacts to improve compliance with enterprise quality standards and technology strategies, whilst also mitigating risk of failure. Management of these additional artefacts is currently improvised because agile development processes lack corresponding ceremonies.