Enhancing usability through agility: Pair programming for a practice-oriented integration approach

Abstract

In many of today's small companies and startups, software development teams consist of small number of developers who can sometimes perform the roles of designers as part of their tasks. This leads to development processes that may not give enough attention to the importance of UX/UI design for the product under development. Moreover, such small teams may lack the required organization skills that help them manage how they work together. As a result, such teams usually face problems with delivering the “right” product, as well as not being able to follow a sustainable development process. In a similar context, CS students in programming classes are facing almost the same problems of small teams in industry. To tackle these problems, many researchers and practitioners have proposed integrating practices from agile and UX design methods to help developers emphasize the UX requirements and be able to organize their work environment. Despite the differences in how they approach their goals, both agile and UX teams seek user satisfaction by providing working and usable software. In our research, we explore how such integration can be a good fit for both CS students and software developers. We begin by showing our proposed set of practices that can be directly applied by developers. We also show how we will proceed by focusing on Pair Programming (PP) as an agile practice that promotes a collaborative work environment, which we will study its impact on students who build user interfaces in a Mobile Software Development course. Using PP in a class sitting will help us evaluate how agile practices that emphasize collaborative workspaces work with UX design, as well as introducing an adaptive and collaborative teaching approach that can be used in CS programming labs.