Integrating Both User-Centered Design and Creative Practices into Agile Development

Abstract

Tensions between software development methodologies and user-centered design (UCD) have always existed, but waterfall methodologies do provide a process context within which UCD methods can be clearly integrated whenever this is required. Popular agile methodologies such as Scrum create different challenges to integrating UCD. However, fitting UCD into agile methodologies will not necessarily result in high software quality. The combined approaches can still have significant design gaps that must be addressed by additional creative design practices. This chapter relates selected historical methodological trends to tensions between software and creative design. To resolve these tensions, innovative software development needs to draw on creative design practices in addition to UCD and agile methods. Specifically, innovative software development needs to draw on three key insights from design research: creative design work co-evolves problem and solution spaces; design materials talk back; and, the best design work is generous in scope and intent. These three insights are used firstly to structure a critique of the Agile Manifesto and secondly to provide the basis for proposing a balanced approach to software development that can appropriately integrate engineering, user-centered and creative design practices.