A survey on interaction design in distributed software development

Abstract

The challenges of design and development of software with geographically distributed stakeholders have not been widely addressed in the literature by the human-computer interaction (HCI) community. Although there are reports of experiences about interaction design in distributed software development (DSD), it is unclear how interaction design has been conducted in DSD projects. This paper presents the results of a survey conducted with the objective of identifying the perception of professionals involved in DSD on interaction design and to verify how interaction design has been conducted in DSD. The results indicated that good practices of interaction design have been adopted in a considerable part of the DSD projects. However, communicability and accessibility have not been considered in most DSD projects. In addition, participatory methods, techniques, and practices have been little used in DSD. The results of this survey provide an overview of how interaction design has been conducted in DSD projects and present the difficulties, challenges, and gaps of interaction design in DSD. We concluded that there is a need for future research to understand interaction design in detail and develop new solutions (or adaptations of existing solutions) of interaction design for the DSD context.