Tool Proposal for Recommending Design Thinking Techniques in Software Development

Abstract

Design Thinking (DT) has been incorporated into software processes by teams from startups to large companies, used in problem exploration fostering innovative solutions, and integrated into agile methods to satisfy the real stakeholders’ needs. DT places the customer needs up-front and helps to empathize with users, examining their behaviors, and producing outcomes focused on users’ demand. A set of techniques, like personas and user journey, can be used to support this human-centered approach. Selecting which technique to use might be challenging since factors such as the application scenario, stakeholder engagement level and previous knowledge of the problem-to-be-solved may vary from case to case. In our previous work we presented a DT session conducted to better understand the need for a recommendation tool, followed by a requirements elicitation activity in which we defined how the tool should work, and an early evaluation of the initial tool low-fidelity prototypes. Inspired by the Design Science Research method, in this article we extend our previous work by furthering what we performed in the tool’s definition process. We included in this work a requirements refining activity through high-level fidelity prototypes, and a requirements validation activity through a questionnaire-based feedback collection with professionals who have experience on the use of DT in software development. Our results show that our proposal offers an useful and easy to use tool to recommend DT techniques with the potential to support those professionals who apply DT in requirements engineering by suggesting techniques that are the best fit to the declared context.