Stories, Sketches, and Lists: Developers and Interaction Designers Interacting Through Artefacts

Agile development places a strong emphasis on interaction and collaboration between people. In this paper, we present a study of collaboration between user interaction designers and developers, with a particular emphasis on the role of artefacts in the process. Our research method is an ethnographic study of a team at work, followed by the application of several kinds of qualitative analysis: activity system analysis, interaction analysis, grounded theory, and contradiction analysis. Each of these analyses yields results that inform an understanding of artefact-mediated collaboration. In particular, we find that both sketches and design stories have critical roles, that these artefacts support creation and reflection, facilitate resolution of contradiction, and also work at a level of consciousness that is below the level of self-awareness.

[1]  Neil A. M. Maiden,et al.  Towards a Framework for Integrating Agile Development and User-Centred Design , 2006, XP.

[2]  Alex Kozulin,et al.  Vygotsky’s Educational Theory in Cultural Context , 2003 .

[3]  Alistair Cockburn,et al.  Agile Software Development , 2001 .

[4]  Anselm L. Strauss,et al.  Basics of qualitative research : techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory , 1998 .

[5]  Jeff Patton,et al.  Hitting the target: adding interaction design to agile software development , 2002, OOPSLA '02.

[6]  Y. Engeström,et al.  Activity theory as a framework for analyzing and redesigning work. , 2000, Ergonomics.

[7]  Austin Henderson,et al.  Interaction Analysis: Foundations and Practice , 1995 .

[8]  Rjoè,et al.  Activity theory as a framework for analyzing and redesigning work , 2005 .

[9]  Helen Sharp,et al.  The role of story cards and the wall in XP teams: a distributed cognition perspective , 2006, AGILE 2006 (AGILE'06).

[10]  Lynn Miller.  Case study of customer input for a successful product , 2005, Agile Development Conference (ADC'05).

[11]  A. Strauss,et al.  Grounded Theory in Practice , 1997 .

[12]  A. N. Leont’ev,et al.  Activity, consciousness, and personality , 1978 .

[13]  Scott W. Ambler,et al.  Agile modeling: effective practices for extreme programming and the unified process , 2002 .

[14]  D. Carr.  : Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action , 1992 .

[15]  Robert Biddle,et al.  Agile Development Iterations and UI Design , 2007, Agile 2007 (AGILE 2007).