Investigating agile user-centered design in practice: A grounded theory perspective

Abstract

This paper investigates how the integration of agile methods and User-Centered Design (UCD) is carried out in practice. For this study, we have applied grounded theory as a suitable qualitative approach to determine what is happening in actual practice. The data was collected by semi-structured interviews with professionals who have already worked with an integrated agile UCD methodology. Further data was collected by observing these professionals in their working context, and by studying their documents, where possible. The emerging themes that the study found show that there is an increasing realization of the importance of usability in software development among agile team members. The requirements are emerging; and both low and high fidelity prototypes based usability tests are highly used in agile teams. There is an appreciation of each other's work from both UCD professionals and developers and both sides can learn from each other. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.