201O Intenational Conference On Computer Design And Appliations (ICCDA 2010) Integrating Usability Engineering and Agile Software Development: A Literature Review Osama Sohaib College of Computing and Information Sciences PAF-KIET Karachi, Pakistan osama.sohaib@gmail.com Abstract - The various agile software development methodologies have promoted since their inception and even demanded high degree to improve the quality of the software product. Usability engineering has made its way into the software mainstream and has caught the attention of software engineers and researchers worldwide due to rapidly growing and volatile internet software industry, despite their diferent perspectives on creating software both have a major role in making good sotware. Usability focuses on how the end users will work with the software and agile development focuses on how the sotware should be developed. The way these two perspectives are being combined in practice is still not well understood. This study is a preliminary literature review that describes the key question that how usability-engineering practices should be integrated with agile software development in order to make stronger and efective usable software system. This paper focuses on identiying the tensions between usability and agile methods. The research aim is to identiy the common approach of agile methods and usability engineering by surveying extensive related work on integration of usability and agile methods. Kewords - usabiliy; user-centered design; agle development; treme programming P); I. INTRODUCTION Sotware plays a signiicant role in lives of persons and in severe competition between companies. That is why Sotware Engineering (SE) is a discipline, which is not shy of introducing new methodologies, and is clearly maturing on complex projects with great achievements. In the past few decades, the issue of how sotware process development and improvement has been discussed that how it should organize in order to deliver faster, better, and cheaper solutions. Large numbers of diferent approaches to sotware development have introduced, of which only few have survived for used today. In recent years, so-called agile methodologies have become increasingly popular. These processes are intended to support iteration rather than traditional development methodology phases and focusing on continual interaction between developers and customers [1]. Ater the completion of iteration, the project team discusses and seeks solutions of the problems discovered in the last iteration. Many of the suggestions for improvement have come rom experienced practitioners, who have Khalid Khan College of Computing and Information Sciences PAF-KIET Karachi, Pakistan khalid.khan@pakiet.edu.pk labeled their methods agile sotware development. While the elements of usability engineering model according to Nielson [2] is early focus on users, user participation in the design, coordination of the diferent parts of the user interface, empirical user testing, and iterative revision of designs based on the test results. Although agile methods share, some of the same aims as usabiliy but there are also distinct diferences. From the perspective of usability and user-centered design, however, agile methods do not inherently provide the required support to the development process. In fact, the agile and user-centered approaches have the potential to work vey well together. Many researchers have discussed the integration of usability and agile methods. This paper tries to combine these inding into a cogent wholeness by addressing the following research questions. RQ 1. What tensions between usability engineering and agile methods have been identiied in related research that makes them diicult to integrate? RQ2. What approaches have been suggested in order to integrate usability and agile methods? The work is organized as follows. Section 2 gives an overview and background of the agile development and the need for usabiliy. Section 3 presents extensive related studies about how usability and agile might work together. Section 4 provides some insights rom the literature review and presents an integrated approach. Finally, the study is concluded and leaves an open issue. II. BACKGROUND In this section, the literature is used to present some background on agile development and on the need for usability. A. Agile development overview The term agile can be deined as "characterized by quickness, lightness, and ease of movement; nimble" (dictionary.com) the term lightweight is also used for agile and has increased the public ttention in late 1990's [3]. One of the primay causes of sotware project failure is the extended period of time it took to develop a system. Agile methods were developed to develop systems more quickly with limited time spent on analysis and design. Agile 978-1-4244-7164-5/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE V2-32 Volume 2