Integrating UCD and an Agile Methodology in the Development of a Mobile Catalog of Plants
The integration of User Centered Design (UCD) and agile methodologies for software development is suitable to achieve software products with higher degree of usability. However there are few controlled experiments that can show the advantages and the appr
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Abstract The integration of User Centered Design (UCD) and agile methodologies for software development is suitable to achieve software products with higher degree of usability. However there are few controlled experiments that can show the advantages and the approach of this integration. The present paper describes the whole process of integrate one of the popular agile methodologies, Extreme Programming (XP), with UCD applied to the construction of a software application. The project deals with a mobile application about the vegetation from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú that allows users to search, recognize and find plants around the university campus. Keywords User centered-design
Usability Agile methodologies XP
1 Introduction One of the main quality features of a software system is its usability [5]. Based on the international standard ISO 9241, the term usability is defined as “the degree to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specific goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specific context of use” [8]. For this reason, methodologies as User Centered Design (UCD) which aimed at achieving usability are really helpful. On the other hand, agile methodologies for software development arise due to one of the problems of software engineering that has been discussed for many years, which is how software development activities must be performed in order to speed up results, reduce costs and get better solutions [15].
M. Aguilar C. Zapata (&) Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru e-mail: [email protected] M. Aguilar e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 M. Soares et al. (eds.), Advances in Ergonomics Modeling, Usability & Special Populations, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 486, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41685-4_8
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It may seem natural to include methods from UCD into Agile development projects. However, the integration of these two approaches is not well defined [4]. While UCD is focused on interaction design and keep constant contact with end users, agile methodologies cover the entire process throughout the lifecycle of the software project [4]. An important similarity between them is that they seek to satisfy the needs and goals of users [2], reason why their integration is suitable to be studied, in order to achieve products with higher degree of usability [19]. The present paper describes the integration of an agile methodology with UCD applied to the construction of a software application. The project deals with a mobile application about the vegetation from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú that allows users to search, recognize and find plants around the university campus. The purpose of the project was to analyze the process of integrate Extreme Programming (XP) with some methods from UCD, emphasizing iterative development cycles and user evaluations. The project was conducted in three parts. The first one, where the requirements were raised through
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