Integrating Usability into the Agile Software Development Life Cycle Using User Experience Practices

Software products have become so influential that they occupy the majority of our time and aid people in accomplishing an overwhelming percentage of daily tasks. Because of this trend, usability has become more important than ever, and like other non-functional qualities, needs to be integrated at every stage of the software development life cycle (SDLC) to produce the most usable products. Even so, current development practices generally introduce usability in later stages of development, causing a gap in usability integration that largely ignores the earlier phases of development. The emergence of Agile methodologies, while generally successful in improving the quality of products, may have contributed to this integration gap as developers are opting to wait for user testing since it occurs iteratively. In actuality, the Agile philosophy supports the early integration of usability in the form of processes and the artifacts that they can produce. In this paper, we explore human-computer interaction (HCI) processes and artifacts and propose a development framework that champions early usability integration in an Agile environment by analyzing their effect on the Scrum and Kanban development frameworks. To gain insight regarding the success of the framework, senior design project groups at an engineering program were interviewed on their inclusion of the components of the proposed framework during the requirements gathering, analysis, and design phases of development. The components of the framework are assessed on their adoptability, how well they were accepted by the developers, and their perceived contribution to the usability of the final product.