Little design up-front: A design science approach to integrating usability into agile requirements engineering

Abstract

In recent years, Design Science has gained wide recognition and acceptance as a formal research method in many disciplines including information systems. Design Science research in Human-Computer Interaction is not so abundant. HCI is a discipline primarily focusing on design, evaluation, and implementation where design plays the role as a process as well as an artefact. In this paper, we present a design science approach using "Little Design Up Front" to integrate the User-Centred Design perspective into Agile Requirements Engineering. We also present the results of two agile projects to validate the proposition that incorporating UCD perspective into Agile Software Development improves the design quality of software systems. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.