Agile Methods and User-Centered Design: How These Two Methodologies are Being Successfully Integrated in Industry

A core principle of agile development is to satisfy the customer by providing valuable software on an early and continuous basis. For a software application to be valuable it should have a user interface that is usable. Recently there has been some evidence that suggests using agile methods alone does not ensure that an applications UI is usable. As a result, there is currently interest in combining Agile methods with user-centered design (UCD) practices. To support existing empirical evidence that these methodologies co-exist effectively we have conducted a study with participants that have previously combined these two methodologies. Our findings, combined with existing work show that the existing model used for agile UCD integration can be broadened into a more common model. In this paper we describe three different approaches taken by our participants to achieve this integration. We term these approaches the generalist, specialist, and the hybrid approach.