Scrum is seen by many as user centred, but how does it really work in practice? Me and Marta Larusdottir set out to investigate this question through an interview study with 21 people who worked with usability in Scrum projects. Marta came from the field of usability evaluation, and she was especially interested in what usability techniques they used in industry.

When we started doing the interviews we were really surprised to find out that the answer to the question: “What usability techniques do they use in practice?” is that there are very few formal evaluation methods that are used at all, and that the methods used are indeed all very informal. The user perspective in Scrum Projects in Practice was indeed only existing, and not explicit.

Conclusions from this study are also that the responsibility for the user perspective is very unclear in Scrum projects. Often the user perspective is neither discussed nor described in the projects. However, the user perspective is often present through informal feedback used to understand the context of use and inform design.

You find these results in this study:

Åsa Cajander, Marta Larusdottir, Jan Gulliksen. Existing but Not Explicit – The User Perspective in Scrum Projects in Practice. Paula Kotz´e; Gary Marsden; Gitte Lindgaard; Janet Wesson; Marco Winckler. 14th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT), Sep 2013, Cape Town, South Africa. Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, LNCS-8119 (Part III), pp.762-779, 2013, Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2013. .