Finding a place for discount usability engineering in agile development: throwing down the gauntlet

Abstract

Many software development organizations are reporting great success with agile software development techniques. However, few techniques explicitly incorporate usability engineering. Further, some agile techniques may not address certain kinds of usability problems, e.g. they may not address the needs of novices as well as expert users. While there are many techniques for usability engineering, discount usability engineering should be of particular interest to the agile development community because the two disciplines share many of the same underlying principles. The challenge for the agile development community is to find ways to incorporate and gain value from such discount usability engineering practices.