1. Integrating User-Centred Design in Agile Development

Integrating user-centered design (UCD) into software development methodologies has always been a challenge. In the first two decades of UCD, structured methodologies provided a process where UCD methods could be clearly integrated, at least in principle, and thus integration challenges were not primarily due to process structures. This changed with the spread of agile software development approaches, which differ substantially from structured development. While there has been progress in combining UCD and agile approaches, many problems remain. In response to this, at NordiCHI 2014, a workshop on Integrating User Centred Design in Agile Development brought together researchers and practitioners at the leading edge of combining these two potentially complementary approaches to software development. The chapters in this book update and extend the position papers that were presented and discussed at the workshop. Six authors developed their position papers into chapters for this book. Five additional chapters introduce the book, report on the initial workshop, and provide three additional studies. The case studies in this book cover a very wide range of organizational sizes (from 8 to 135,000) in over 15 countries, operating in consumer, Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), large Business to Business (B2B), public sector and non-profit markets across a range of around 20 application domains. Some chapters synthesise several studies that were conducted over a number of years. This introduction presents the context for the workshop, identifies common themes with regard to cultures, teams and tasks in agile UCD development, and discusses future trends and a research agenda for adapting UCD to agile development contexts.