Integrating design thinking into extreme programming

Abstract

The increased demand for information systems drives businesses to rethink their customer needs to a greater extent and undertake innovation to compete in the marketplace. The design thinking (DT) is a human-centered methodology leads to creativity and innovation. The agile applications development such as extreme programming (XP) as a rapid application development approach tends to focus on perfecting functionality requirement and technical implementation. However, it causes significant challenges to building software/applications to meet the needs of end-user. This study integrates DT practices into XP methodology to improve the quality of software product for the end-users and enable businesses to achieve creativity and innovation. The proposed integrated DT@XP framework presents the various DT practices (empathy, define, persona, DT user stories) are adapted into XP exploration phase, prototyping and usability evaluation into XP planning phase. Our work demonstrates the applicability of DT concepts to analyze customer/user involvement in XP projects.