Designing Requirements: Incorporating Usage-Centered Design into an Agile SW Development Process

Abstract

Over the past years of developing software I’ve increased efforts to understand what makes the development process successful and what makes it fail. This paper describes how starting to develop using agile methodologies solved many but not all problems. And how subsequently discovering Constantine and Lockwood’s Usage-Centered Design and incorporating it into an Agile Development process increased our likelihood of success. In addition to being more likely to meet end-user expectations, UC-D helped our team do that sooner, guess right more often, and achieve our goal of releasing usable software earlier. U-CD represents a repeatable, collaborative approach to interaction design that can be incorporated into an agile software development process.