On the Mapping of Underlying Concepts of a Combined Use of Lean and User-Centered Design with Agile Development: The Case Study of the Transformation Process of an IT Company

Abstract

The agile development of software requires new approaches to serve users and end customers. The combination of Lean and User-Centered Design with Agile gives software development a competitive advantage. Given the novelty and scarcity of studies on such combined use in software development, as part of our long-term research that aims to develop a maturity model to accelerate the transformation from agile to the use of the combined approaches, we posed as our first step to identify what are the underlying concepts involved on the use of agile, lean, and user-centered design. We first conducted multiple literature reviews to identify the concepts for each of the individual approaches to then conduct an empirical study in order to identify what is considered useful by two software teams of a multinational IT company that are going through such a transformation for about 6 months. Our study revealed that there are concepts from literature not yet considered in practice and the other way around, there are practiced concepts not found in literature. For now, we hypothesize that this is due to the early maturing process of the studied teams. We believe that this is an initial contribution that can be of help for other teams enduring this challenging transformation process. Our research will next investigate how the three approaches relate to one another in order to provide a unique and consolidated combined model of concepts that will further be used as the skeleton of our maturity model.