Usability Integration in Agile Development Processes: A Practice-Oriented Best Practice Approach

Abstract

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) increasingly rely on agile software development. However, the majority of established usability methods have been developed with traditional software engineering principles in mind. So, one might assume that these methods and tools might not be applicable to agile development projects. In this paper, a possible approach to systematically adapting traditional usability methods to application in agile projects is introduced and documented as best practices. These best practices can be quickly and dynamically employed by agile development team members and can thus contribute to higher quality of software development outputs. The approach described in this paper was developed in the context of a German research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and conducted by one research institute and three software-developing enterprises and will be evaluated throughout the further course of the project. For this purpose, a number of best practices have been adapted to the context of agile software development and described in detail in order to allow inexperienced software developers of small and medium-sized enterprises to successfully apply these best practices. As two examples of these best practices, we illustrate the best practices ‘Contextual Inquiry’ and ‘Template-Based UI Design’ in this paper.