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

Abstract

As the practice of software engineering matures, project teams are leveraging the expertise of those with a background in other domains such as usability. This paper proposes a model and agenda for understanding and improving social interaction on agile usability software teams. We argue that social interaction on multidisciplinary agile usability teams, as a means to integrating the software development and usability domains, impacts how usability knowledge is managed, and thus, software product innovation. This work contributes: 1 a background, analysis, and discussion of the various agile usability integration strategies to-date 2 a model for investigating the social interaction in agile usability teams 3 a research, practice, and policy agenda for future work toward improving the social interaction in multidisciplinary agile usability software teams.

Exploring principles of user-centered agile software development: A literature review

“…Sohaib and Khan [23], da Silva et al [20], and Barksdale and McCrickard [22] provide comprehensive overviews of approaches to UCASD. The reviews, which are briefly summarized in the following, each have a unique focus and pursue different objectives.…”

“…While the works of Sohaib and Khan [23] and da Silva et al [20] focus strongly on practices, Barksdale and McCrickard [22] are most interested in the people/social dimension. Therefore, none of the reviews that cover all relevant dimensions of UCASD in an integrated manner.…”

“…The different levels of integration presented by Barksdale and McCrickard [22] allow for a comprehensive and differentiated classification of existing works on UCASD. In our literature analysis, we therefore used these integration levels as a starting point to determine the basic dimensions of our coding system.…”

“…Given the need to deliver business value to the customer in a rapidly changing environment while taking the needs of end-users into account, the integration of UCD and ASD seems to be a promising endeavor and has received increasing attention in recent years [20,22,23]. In contrast to plan-driven SE, whose properties often impede the integration of UCD [25,26], similarities between ASD and UCD provide a common ground, which eases integration.…”

“…Moreover, owing to these similarities, a multitude of integration approaches has been suggested in the literature [20,21,24]. Thereby, some authors focus on the benefits of integrating particular usability practices into ASD [23,47] or vice versa, while other authors propose integrated user-centered agile software development (UCASD) approaches [20,22].…”