Agile Development and User Experience Design Integration as an Ongoing Achievement in Practice

Little is known about how Agile developers and UX designers integrate their work on a day-to-day basis. While accounts in the literature attempt to integrate Agile development and UX design by combining their processes and tools, the contradicting claims found in the accounts complicate extracting advice from such accounts. This paper reports on three ethnographically-informed field studies of the day-today practice of developers and designers in organisational settings. Our results show that integration is achieved in practice through (1) mutual awareness, (2) expectations about acceptable behaviour, (3) negotiating progress and (4) engaging with each other. Successful integration relies on practices that support and maintain these four aspects in the day-to-day work of developers and designers.

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