INTEGRATING UCD WITHIN AN AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS IN AN EDUCATIONAL SETTING

Abstract

The Canadian Engineering Accreditation Boardhas defined 12 attributes that an institution must demonstrategraduates of its engineering program possess. We are inpursuit of the attribute "Design” dealing with the students’ability to select candidate engineering design solutions fordevelopment, with three indicators relating to how candidatesolutions are selected. Our approach to teaching “Design” isbased on “learning outcomes” rather than “teaching inputs”.In this paper, we describe the learning outcomes of teaching anewly proposed Integrated User Centered Design (UCD)-Agile Process in the context of a one term project coursewherein teams of undergraduate students apply what theyhave learnt about Agile software development and UserInterface (UI) design in the context of a real-world projectwith actual clients. The Integrated UCD-Agile Processincludes upfront design of the UI in parallel with developmentof the functionalities, UI design specialists for each sprint andusability testing of all UI design decisions