Usability in agile software development: A tertiary study
Introduction
In the last years users have become more experienced in the use of software systems and much more demanding for quality products. For this scenario agile methodologies speed up the process of building software with more frequent deliveries to customers. Nevertheless, agile practitioners often drive their attention to understand customer's needs, trying to answer the question of how useful the developed software can be, focusing on providing an appropriate functional scope. They often do not focus on developing software that is considered usable by the customer [1], [2], [3]. During the agile development customers are usually closer and more involved with the process making it easier to provide constant feedback. These feedbacks are valuable to have a good user experience. The problem is that the agile practitioners usually focus on delivering the working software but neglect the user experience, and hardly discuss about users or users’ interface [4]. In some agile methodologies or frameworks like Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), and Feature-driven Development (FDD) there is no defined role that represents a user interface specialist or an interaction designer. This role in agile teams is not clear and largely overlooked [S6]. Moreover, none of the major agile methods include guidance for the practitioner to develop usable software [5]. As described by Salah, Paige and Cairns [S6], “practices for understanding, eliciting usability and user requirement and evaluating agile systems for usability and user experience are generally considered deficient”. In software engineering the usability is not a central topic because it is considered one of many non-functional requirements and quality attributes [6], but it has become recognized as a crucial point for the success in highly competitive markets [S9]. In this context the need for a better integration between usability and the agile software development process arises.
During our initial investigation, exploring this thematic, we did not find any study that could bring us a consolidated view about the available literature review related to this possible integration. For this reason, we decided to develop a tertiary study that aimed to identify not only systematic literature reviews (SLR) but also other types of secondary studies, including systematic mapping studies and non-systematic literature reviews to enrich the research, discussion, and also the results. Our goal was to identify how the recent studies are trying to integrate these two areas, analyze and discuss the quality of these studies, and map what are the challenges in the integration between these two areas of knowledge. Through answering the research questions and topics presented in this study we intended to provide knowledge about the addressed topic for future works.
This work is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the main concepts of usability and agile software development. Section 3 explains the method and the search strategies that were used in this article. Section 4 presents the primary results found and also the answers of the research questions. Section 5 presents a discussion of the results. In Section 6 the threats to the validity of the study are described. Finally, in Section 7 the conclusion of the research is presented.
Section snippets
Usability
The term “usability” is related to software products quality studies as well as to ergonomics, interaction design, and human-computer interaction studies. Usability is defined by the International Organization for Standardization ISO 9241-11:1998 [7] as "the extent to which a system, product or service can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use". Usability is also a sub-characteristic of software
Research method
This tertiary study was developed following the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham and Charters [26] for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering. The guidelines were created to assist researchers, meta-analysts and reviewers in designing, conducting, and evaluating empirical research. To conduct the research specific phases are proposed: planning, conducting and reporting the review. The planning phase is dedicated to identifying the need for the review, including goals
Results
In this section the data extraction results and the answers to the research questions are described.
Discussion
This tertiary study was conducted by following the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham and Charters [26] to conduct systematic literature reviews. Of the initial 3065 papers selected in well-known electronic research databases, 14 studies were selected following a rigorous process, from the selection of the studies to the discussions performed to solve disagreements found during the selections process that were performed in pairs. Although we did not delete any research, all 14 selected studies
Threats to validity
The first threat to validity of this study is related to the bias on the process of selection of the studies. To reduce this bias the guidelines proposed in Kitchenham and Charters [26] and Petersen et al. [27] were followed. Using the criteria to studies selection phase, we excluded the work of Cockton et al. [46] once it is a kind of proceedings of the workshop that was held in 2014 (NordiCHI) and not a secondary study itself.
This systematic study was developed using four databases
Conclusion and future work
This section will present the final conclusions of the study, taking into consideration the research questions that based this study.
- 1)
What research questions were investigated in the secondary studies?
Table 4 describes in detail all research questions used on selected secondary studies. In general we have some studies investigating the key point of tension or challenging factors to integrate usability and agile methods [S1], [S3], [S6] in order to provide effective usable software systems, other
Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education) – Brazil (process no. 88887.147219/2017-00).
Karina Curcio has a Bachelor's degree in Informatics, Master's in Electrical Engineering at Federal University of Technology - Paraná. She is a PhD. candidate at Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná and her research interests are in software engineering, software quality, agile software development and innovation.
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2020, Journal of Cleaner ProductionCitation Excerpt :It would cover diverse area not limited in one case study for interest to the broader audience of researchers working in different studies area. Second, engineering usability approach of software (Curcio et al., 2019; Llerena et al., 2019; Nielsen, 1994) in the future can test the tool’s suitability to be directed and measured for its computational competence, integrative enhancement and Graphical User Interface (GUI). Third, in the other MCDA extensions’ case, it is possible to produce chosen MCDA methods’ parameters, which can’t include additional criteria or exclude existing criteria (Dias et al., 2002; Figueira and Roy, 2002), and is possible to gauge sustainability of authentic hiccups and glitches and is possible to practice the algorithm communication procedure of server.
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Karina Curcio has a Bachelor's degree in Informatics, Master's in Electrical Engineering at Federal University of Technology - Paraná. She is a PhD. candidate at Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná and her research interests are in software engineering, software quality, agile software development and innovation.
Rodolfo Santana has a Bachelor's degree in Informatics, Specialist in Software Engineering. He is a Master's candidate at Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná and his research interests are in software engineering, software product lines and open innovation.
Sheila Reinehr has a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Master's in Informatics and Doctorate in Engineering. Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná with experience in software engineering, software process improvement, agile software development, software quality, and software engineering education.
Andreia Malucelli has a Bachelor's degree in Informatics, Master's in Electrical Engineering and Doctorate in Electrical and Computing Engineering. Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná with experience in software engineering, artificial intelligence, organizational learning, ontologies and software engineering education.