Who is to Blame: A Comprehensive Review of Challenges and Opportunities in Designer-Developer Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews challenges in designer-developer collaboration, analyzes real-world discussions, and proposes best practices to improve teamwork and software quality.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive literature review, empirical analysis of forums, and identifies practical collaboration challenges and solutions for SDEs and UXDs.

Findings

Identified three key collaboration challenges.

Uncovered two main categories of best practices.

Validated challenges and solutions through real-world forum analysis.

Abstract

Software development relies on effective collaboration between Software Development Engineers (SDEs) and User eXperience Designers (UXDs) to create software products of high quality and usability. While this collaboration issue has been explored over the past decades, anecdotal evidence continues to indicate the existence of challenges in their collaborative efforts. To understand this gap, we first conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 45 papers published since 2004, uncovering three key collaboration challenges and two main categories of potential best practices. We then analyzed designer and developer forums and discussions from one open-source software repository to assess how the challenges and practices manifest in the status quo. Our findings have broad applicability for collaboration in software development, extending beyond the partnership between SDEs and UXDs. The suggested best practices and interventions also act as a reference for future research, assisting in the development of dedicated collaboration tools for SDEs and UXDs.