Agile development methodologies are becoming increasingly popular because they address many risks of software development through things such as quick delivery of working software and responsiveness to change. As agile organizations have begun to develop more user interface-intensive systems, they understand the value and need to design more usable systems. The fields of usability engineering and human-computer interaction are focused on exploring how people interact with computer systems. However, much of this work is inaccessible to agile practitioners because it does not align with core agile values and because there has not been adequate transfer of knowledge between practice and academia. This motivated my creation of the eXtreme Scenario-Based Design (XSBD) process, an integrated agile usability approach. XSBD provides key usability benefits of the scenario-based design (SBD) approach (an established usability engineering process) and is compatible with an agile development framework modeled on leading agile processes like XP and Scrum. XSBD was designed for use in projects in which a large part of the overall system quality is determined by system usability. This requires close communication and coordination of the disparate usability and agile development work practices. A core aspect of XSBD is the central design record (CDR), which is the shared design representation that guides usability design. It tightly couples usability evaluation results to design features and high level project goals, allowing the usability engineer to leverage key benefits of traditional SBD while working in an agile framework. I began developing XSBD at Virginia Tech, evaluating it through several student-led development efforts. To improve and demonstrate the applicability of XSBD in practice, I partnered with Meridium, Inc., a software and services company. Using an action research case study method, I worked with several development teams there who used XSBD to develop products. This directly linked usability and HCI research to practice, allowing me to demonstrate XSBD's utility in practice while evaluating it from a theoretical perspective. The results of this work suggest several avenues for further work both to increase its adoption in practice and to link to existing HCI research efforts such as design rationale and knowledge reuse. / Ph. D.

As the practice of software engineering matures, project teams are leveraging the expertise of those with a background in other disciplines such as user experience. This multidisciplinary collaboration has implications on how user experience is incorporated into the software they produce. It also has consequences for the interaction within the team. This research aims to address the implications and consequences by explaining and evaluating the impact of socio-cognitive factors and governance forms on agile user experience software teams. The objective is to support multidisciplinary agile user experience software teams in managing their interaction as a means to improving how user experience knowledge is managed. Results from a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) were that: a combination of trust and shared meaning are associated with the impediment of knowledge construction and dissemination; a combination of lead governance, trust, and shared meaning are associated with knowledge dissemination; and a combination of lead governance and shared meaning are associated with the impediment of knowledge use. Review from an expert review of the Team Interaction Framework were that there are benefits to using the framework and ways to ease it use, but also limitations and anticipated challenges to its application. The findings from this research suggest that each theoretical component of the framework is relevant, but it is unclear whether the structural dimension is useful when studying agile user experience teams given environment similarity across teams. The contributions of this research are the Team Interaction Framework as a guide to evaluating the social interaction in agile user experience teams, a method for assessing the social interaction in agile user experience teams via a Team Interaction Assessment, and lightweight practices for improving the social interaction in these teams. / Ph. D.

Esta dissertação de mestrado fez parte do projeto Qualipso (Quality Platform for Open Source Software) que teve como principal objetivo melhorar a confiabilidade de sistemas de software livre. Nesse contexto, o enfoque desta pesquisa é um dos atributos de qualidade de software: usabilidade. As práticas de usabilidade no desenvolvimento de software livre, são aplicadas na maioria das vezes, em projetos patrocinados por grandes empresas ou que possuam especialistas em usabilidade como membros da equipe. Mas, em projetos menores da comunidade, compostos geralmente por desenvolvedores, raramente ela é considerada. Porém, a usabilidade é um atributo fundamental para a qualidade durante o uso de um sistema. Com base em valores compartilhados entre as comunidades de métodos ágeis e de software livre, esta dissertação propõe a adaptação de práticas de usabilidade no contexto de métodos ágeis para o contexto de comunidades de software livre. Por meio de pesquisa bibliográfica, levantamos as principais práticas de usabilidade tanto no âmbito de métodos ágeis, quanto no âmbito de software livre, e as classificamos de acordo com as fases do Design Centrado em Usuário, descrevendo cada uma com o formato nome-contexto-problema-solução-exemplos. As práticas foram exploradas em projetos de software livre, o que possibilitou maior entendimento de problemas enfrentados em contextos reais. Essa experiência resultou na proposta de adaptação de práticas de usabilidade ágil no contexto de comunidades de software livre. Dessa forma, descrevemos a realização de uma pesquisa-ação no projeto Arquigrafia-Brasil, um estudo de caso no projeto Mezuro e a aplicação de práticas de usabilidade em quatro projetos do Centro de Competência em Software Livre do IME-USP. / This Masters thesis was part of the Qualipso project (Quality Platform for Open Source Software) whose main objective was to improve the reliability of free and open source software systems. Within such context, the focus of this research is one of the attributes of software quality: usability. The usability practices in free and open source software development are applied most often in projects sponsored by large companies or employing usability experts as team members. But on smaller projects in the community, generally composed by developers, it is rarely considered. However, usability is an essential attribute to the quality in use of a system. Based on values shared between the communities of agile methods and free and open source software, this thesis proposes the adaptation of usability practices in the context of agile methods to the context of free and open source software communities. Through the study of the literature in the field, we gathered the main usability practices both within agile methods, as in free and open source software, and we classified according to User-Centered Design phases, describing each one with the format name-context-problem-solution-examples. The practices were explored in free and open source software projects, which enabled greater understanding of problems faced in real contexts. This experience resulted in the adaptation proposal of agile usability practices into the context of free and open source software communities. We describe the implementation of an action research in the Arquigrafia-Brazil project, a case study in the Mezuro project and the application of usability practices in four projects of the IME-USP FLOSS Competence Center.

Esta dissertação de mestrado fez parte do projeto Qualipso (Quality Platform for Open Source Software) que teve como principal objetivo melhorar a confiabilidade de sistemas de software livre. Nesse contexto, o enfoque desta pesquisa é um dos atributos de qualidade de software: usabilidade. As práticas de usabilidade no desenvolvimento de software livre, são aplicadas na maioria das vezes, em projetos patrocinados por grandes empresas ou que possuam especialistas em usabilidade como membros da equipe. Mas, em projetos menores da comunidade, compostos geralmente por desenvolvedores, raramente ela é considerada. Porém, a usabilidade é um atributo fundamental para a qualidade durante o uso de um sistema. Com base em valores compartilhados entre as comunidades de métodos ágeis e de software livre, esta dissertação propõe a adaptação de práticas de usabilidade no contexto de métodos ágeis para o contexto de comunidades de software livre. Por meio de pesquisa bibliográfica, levantamos as principais práticas de usabilidade tanto no âmbito de métodos ágeis, quanto no âmbito de software livre, e as classificamos de acordo com as fases do Design Centrado em Usuário, descrevendo cada uma com o formato nome-contexto-problema-solução-exemplos. As práticas foram exploradas em projetos de software livre, o que possibilitou maior entendimento de problemas enfrentados em contextos reais. Essa experiência resultou na proposta de adaptação de práticas de usabilidade ágil no contexto de comunidades de software livre. Dessa forma, descrevemos a realização de uma pesquisa-ação no projeto Arquigrafia-Brasil, um estudo de caso no projeto Mezuro e a aplicação de práticas de usabilidade em quatro projetos do Centro de Competência em Software Livre do IME-USP. / This Masters thesis was part of the Qualipso project (Quality Platform for Open Source Software) whose main objective was to improve the reliability of free and open source software systems. Within such context, the focus of this research is one of the attributes of software quality: usability. The usability practices in free and open source software development are applied most often in projects sponsored by large companies or employing usability experts as team members. But on smaller projects in the community, generally composed by developers, it is rarely considered. However, usability is an essential attribute to the quality in use of a system. Based on values shared between the communities of agile methods and free and open source software, this thesis proposes the adaptation of usability practices in the context of agile methods to the context of free and open source software communities. Through the study of the literature in the field, we gathered the main usability practices both within agile methods, as in free and open source software, and we classified according to User-Centered Design phases, describing each one with the format name-context-problem-solution-examples. The practices were explored in free and open source software projects, which enabled greater understanding of problems faced in real contexts. This experience resulted in the adaptation proposal of agile usability practices into the context of free and open source software communities. We describe the implementation of an action research in the Arquigrafia-Brazil project, a case study in the Mezuro project and the application of usability practices in four projects of the IME-USP FLOSS Competence Center.