Existing but Not Explicit - The User Perspective in Scrum Projects in Practice

Abstract

Agile software development processes are becoming more common, but this does not mean that the user perspective in the development is catered for. It has its challenges to integrate the users’ aspects in Scrum projects in practice. In order to better understand these challenges we have interviewed IT professionals using Scrum focusing on four different areas: responsibility for the user perspective, emphasis on usability and user experience through documentation, usability activities with users and the organisational and contextual settings for emphasizing the user perspective. Results show that the responsibility for the user perspective is unclear in Scrum projects, and that often the user perspective is neither discussed nor described in the projects. However, the user perspective is often present through informal feedback used to understand the context of use and inform design for example. Finally the paper presents implications for working with the user perspective in Scrum projects.