Agile Requirements Engineering: A systematic literature review

ContextIn the last decade, software development has been characterized by two major approaches: agile software development, which aims to achieve increased velocity and flexibility during the development process, and user-centered design, which places the goals and needs of the system's end-users at the center of software development in order to deliver software with appropriate usability. Hybrid development models, referred to as user-centered agile software development (UCASD) in this article, propose to combine the merits of both approaches in order to design software that is both useful and usable. ObjectiveThis paper aims to capture the current state of the art in UCASD approaches and to derive generic principles from these approaches. More specifically, we investigate the following research question: Which principles constitute a user-centered agile software development approach? MethodWe conduct a systematic review of the literature on UCASD. Identified works are analyzed using a coding scheme that differentiates four levels of UCASD: the process, practices, people/social and technology dimensions. Through subsequent synthesis, we derive generic principles of UCASD. ResultsWe identified and analyzed 83 relevant publications. The analysis resulted in a comprehensive coding system and five principles for UCASD: (1) separate product discovery and product creation, (2) iterative and incremental design and development, (3) parallel interwoven creation tracks, (4) continuous stakeholder involvement, and (5) artifact-mediated communication. ConclusionOur paper contributes to the software development body of knowledge by (1) providing a broad overview of existing works in the area of UCASD, (2) deriving an analysis framework (in form a coding system) for works in this area, going beyond former classifications, and (3) identifying generic principles of UCASD and associating them with specific practices and processes.

Exploring principles of user-centered agile software development

A systematic mapping study of mobile application testing techniques

Agile development processes and User Centred Design (UCD) integration have been gaining increased interest, in part due to the complementarity of the techniques, the benefits each can apply to the other, and the challenges associated with their combination. This paper describes a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that was conducted on Agile and UCD integration. The aim of this SLR was to identify various challenging factors that restrict Agile and User Centred Design Integration (AUCDI) and explore the proposed practices to deal with them. The study included a total of 71 papers and excluded 80 papers published from the year 2000 till 2012. AUCDI challenges and their respective proposed practices and success factors were synthesized. A description and taxonomy of AUCDI challenges and its respective success factors and practices were reported. Practitioners can utilise the results in identifying potential AUCDI challenges and practices or success factors to deal with them.

A systematic literature review for agile development processes and user centred design integration

Since the release of the first mobile devices, the usability of on-board applications has been the concern not only of software vendors but hardware manufacturers as well. The academia community later willingly joined the discussion on usability in terms of theory and empirical measurement, having experience and knowledge in desktop settings. At first sight, such a background should guarantee a solid foundation to conduct research on software usability in a new setting. However, a preliminary study on the subject matter revealed methodological disorder in contemporary literature. As a matter of fact, a need emerged to review existing usability definitions, attributes and measures to recognize all associated aspects. In order to fill this void, we conducted a systematic literature review on usability studies indexed by the Scopus database and devoted to mobile applications. The input volume covers 790 documents from 2001 to 2018. The data analysis shows that the ISO 9241–11 usability definition has been adopted in an unchanged form and popularized as the standard by the HCI community. Secondly, in total, 75 attributes were identified and analysed. The most frequent are efficiency (70%), satisfaction (66%) and effectiveness (58%), which directly originate from the above definition. Subsequently, the less frequent are learnability (45%), memorability (23%), cognitive load (19%) and errors (17%). The last two concern simplicity (13%) and ease of use (9%). Thirdly, in the evaluation of usability, controlled observation and surveys are two major research methods applied, while eye-tracking, thinking aloud and interview are hardly used and serve as complementary to collect additional data. Moreover, usability evaluations are often confused with user experience dimensions, covering not only application quality characteristics, but also user beliefs, emotions and preferences. All these results indicate the need for further research on the usability of mobile applications, aiming to establish a consensus in the theory and practice among all interested parties.

/pdf/usability-of-mobile-applications-a-systematic-literature-551zviaiew.pdf

Usability of Mobile Applications: A Systematic Literature Study

A guide to agile development of interactive software with a User Objectives-driven methodology

This paper focuses on applying usability engineering in the agile methodology called InterMod. The aim of InterMod is to help with the accurate development of high-quality interactive software. This is realized by means of software engineering model-driven activities and continuous assessment in which some usability evaluation techniques have been suitably integrated. The approach here presented has been used in the development process of a mobile application. So, we have proved it is possible to appropriately integrate usability evaluation techniques in agile methodologies, such as InterMod. Furthermore, improvements have been produced since early steps of the development process. On the one hand this integration promotes a development tailored to users' expectations; on the other hand it helps to plan the agile process of activities.

Combining InterMod agile methodology with usability engineering in a mobile application development

How usability assessment of mobile interactive applications should be conducted in the frame of agile methodologies is an open question. On the one hand, usability evaluation consumes time and resources, which can make agile methodologies lose their agile essence. On the other hand, there is a considerable debate about whether user interactions with mobile systems should be investigated in the field or in more traditional laboratory environments. This work compares the results of a field study conducted in an interactive context-dependent mobile application with performed laboratory studies. This study has allowed identifying different interaction patterns and contextual factors not likely to be simulated in laboratory environment. Integrating field evaluations in agile methodologies is consistent with the objective of improving product quality through incremental assessments.

Field vs. Laboratory Usability Evaluations: a Study on a Context Dependent Mobile Application Developed with an Agile Methodology

Agile and User-Centered Design (UCD) integration allows the advantages of both approaches to be taken in a hybrid method. The requirements will evolve and gradually adapt to the needs of users and customers, and UCD techniques will improve usability and User eXperience (UX) of the developed software. However, there has been much discussion about the challenges of this integration, because of the differing philosophies.User stories and use cases are the typical artifacts for specifying requirements in agile methodologies. On the other hand, prototypes, Persona, scenarios, task analysis and usability testing are UCD techniques, frequently employed in Requirements Engineering. Numerous authors have studied the best way for these techniques and artifacts to be compatible in hybrid methods. However, the different approaches of Agile and UCD make it difficult to jointly apply and manage an agile-UCD project.This article proposes User Objectives for the collection and development of requirements in an agile and user-centered project. The UOs collect the functional and non-functional requirements of the user's wishes. Completing a UO implies the orderly realization of three activities: Specification of Requirements, Presentation and Functionality. This enables, the flexible planning of an order in which to carry out activities, according to agile and UCD criteria. Moreover, the UOs are organized in different categories according to both their development and their relationship with the user. The UOs diagrams enable both the progress of the project to be visualized, thereby facilitating the modularization, prioritization and planning; and also the monitoring of the UOs evaluated with UCD techniques, as well as those that still need to be evaluated.

Flexible Requirement Development through User Objectives in an Agile-UCD Hybrid Approach

Agile methods, model-driven developments and user-centred design are three approaches widely accepted in the development of interactive software. In this paper we present InterMod, a new approach that integrates all three methods. The project planning is based on User Objectives and the process is organised as a series of iterations, where the work is distributed in different workgroups according to some developmental and integration activities, each one driven by models. The requirements are incrementally collected and evaluated with models based on user-centered design. To speed up this validation, we put forward the SE-HCI model, which enriches a human-computer interaction model with the semantics of the application and some basic characteristics of an abstract prototype. This allows gather and validate the requirements incrementally. Moreover, this iterative process speeds up the development and generates results from the

/pdf/agile-development-of-interactive-software-by-means-of-user-ce7j68ir6a.pdf

Begoña Losada

Papers

A guide to agile development of interactive software with a User Objectives-driven methodology

Combining InterMod agile methodology with usability engineering in a mobile application development

Field vs. Laboratory Usability Evaluations: a Study on a Context Dependent Mobile Application Developed with an Agile Methodology

Flexible Requirement Development through User Objectives in an Agile-UCD Hybrid Approach

Agile Development of Interactive Software by means of User Objectives