Easing Team Politics in Agile Usability: A Concept Mapping Approach

Abstract

Abstract-Team politics complicate software projects. They cause internal conflicts that can not only cost a software team time and money, but may also detract from the needs of the product's end users. In this paper, we explore the use of concept maps as a means of mitigating such team conflicts. Approaching agile usability through the lens of distributed cognition, concept mapping could improve team communications. We conducted interviews with eleven practitioners from three local software development companies to gain preliminary evidence of the practicality of the approach. Participants were questioned about their challenges in agile development and about their overall impressions of a concept mapping approach. We asked about the practicality and acceptability of implementing such a methodology, along with general concerns and recommendations. Results indicate that there is a need for improvement in agile usability, and a concept mapping approach is promising for addressing existing concerns. With refinement of the method and the development of the proper tools, this approach has great potential to improve team interaction in agile usability environments.

Integrating usability work into a large inter-organisational agile development project: Tactics developed by usability designers

“…The same has also been observed to be true of the introduction of usability designers into agile project teams (Lee et al, 2013). There are accounts of how usability designers lose leverage in developmental decision making (Barksdale et al, 2009;Kuusinen et al, 2012) and their decreased visibility over the course of the project (Isomursu et al, 2012). These observations show how important it that usability designers are able to collaborate with their agile partners if integration goals are to be achieved (Kollmann et al, 2009;Brown et al, 2011;Raison and Schmidt, 2013).…”

Quantified extreme scenario based design approach

“…2) Usability practices: introducing any of the usability practices to be integrated in agile processes. Based on distributed cognition approach, Barksdale derived DCog-based agile usability to distribute the knowledge between the usability engineer and the rest of the agile team [6]. The concept mapping process achieves its goal of improving team interaction but with more documentation which is not totally compatible with agile principles.…”

Software product innovation in agile usability teams: an analytical framework of social capital, network governance, and usability knowledge management

“…At a higher level of task abstraction, Barksdale and his colleagues (Barksdale and McCrickard, 2010;Barksdale et al, 2009) presented a method for connecting the various domains through the use of concept mapping. They argue that collaborative concept mapping can alleviate politics on agile usability teams and can improve their interaction by facilitating communication while enabling role autonomy.…”