Cross-Section Evidence-based Timelines for Software Process Improvement Retrospectives: A Case Study of User eXperience Integration

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel timeline-based retrospective method for evaluating and improving UX integration in software development, leveraging SPI practices to enhance organizational learning and reduce memory bias.

Contribution

It introduces a cross-section, evidence-based timeline retrospective approach for UX integration, extending SPI methods beyond project scope to organizational level.

Findings

The method improves retrospective effectiveness and reduces memory bias.

Practitioners find the approach useful for organizational reflection.

Cross-section timelines reveal organizational issues in UX integration.

Abstract

Although integrating UX practices into software development processes is a type of Software Process Improvement (SPI) activity, this has not yet been taken into account in UX publications. In this study, we approach UX integration in a software development company in Sweden from a SPI perspective. Following the guidelines in SPI literature, we performed a retrospective meeting at the company to reflect on their decade of SPI activities for enhancing UX integration. The aim of the meeting was to reflect on, learn from, and coordinate various activities spanned across various organizational units and projects. We therefore supported the meeting by a pre- generated timeline of the main activities in the organization that is different from common project retrospective meetings in SPI. This approach is a refinement of a similar approach that is used in Agile projects, and is shown to improve effectiveness of, and decrease memory bias. We hypothesized that this method can be useful in the context of UX integration, and in this broader scope. To evaluate the method we gathered practitioners' view through a questionnaire. The findings showed our hypothesis to be plausible. Here, we present that UX integration research and practice can benefit from the SPI body of knowledge; We also show that such cross-section evidence-based timeline retrospective meetings are useful for UX integration, and in a larger scale than one project, especially for identifying and reflecting on 'organizational issues'. This approach also provides a cross- section longitudinal overview of the SPI activities that cannot easily be gained in other common SPI learning approaches.