On the Use of Design Thinking: A Survey of the Brazilian Agile Software Development Community

Abstract

Design Thinking (DT) has been chosen as an approach to support problem-solving by many software development companies. However, there are divergences between the professionals of these companies concerning which techniques are performed, which steps are followed, and the way to implement this approach, as it proposes itself, to be divergent to generate numerous alternatives and, also, convergent, to find a solution. For this reason, aiming to characterize how the software companies have been implemented DT, this paper presents the results of a survey answered by 127 professionals from the Brazilian software industry. The results report a variety of scenarios in which DT has been applied: more than ten different models (sets of steps) are followed by the professionals; more than 50 techniques have been used, mainly, for meeting the needs in the process, according to the context of use and based on previous experiences. We also present 29 computational tools that, according to the respondents, assist the execution of DT, in addition to the integration with agile methods, allowing them to generate ideas and solutions, to explore and understand the problem.