Usability in agile software development: A tertiary study

In the last years the interest in developing research on integration of usability and agile software development has been increasing. The number of systematic literature reviews, systematic mapping studies and non-systematic reviews, related to this thematic has also increased. Nevertheless, there is no analysis on the quality of these published secondary studies, nor is there a consolidated research that brings the answer of how to integrate these two areas. The goal of this paper is to categorize secondary studies related to the integration of usability and agile software development and present a critical analysis on the quality of the selected studies. To accomplish this goal a tertiary study was performed to categorize the related studies selected. Initially 3,065 papers were identified and further narrowed to 14 by applying exclusion criteria and analysis. We classified the selected studies as systematic literature reviews, systematic mapping studies and non-systematic literature reviews to report the data analysis. As a result of this study different forms to integrate usability and agile software development were detected as well as the various challenges that must be overcome for the integration success. Six main categories were identified to represent ways of integrating usability into agile development: processes, techniques, practices, recommendations, principles and different approaches. Regarding to the challenges for the integration seven main categories were also identified: issues related to tests, time, work balance, modularization, feedback, prioritization, and documentation. Although the interest in researching the integration of usability and agile software development has increased in the last years, mostly of the analyzed studies neglected the quality criteria and presented difficulties to use methods to synthetize the research results. Despite this, it has been realized that the integration of usability with agile software development is possible and is strongly aligned with user-centered design. The initial studies indicated a separation of activities and roles into specific tracks with parallel work to treat usability in agile software development, but the trend is no longer to manage and control these activities in separate ways, so new challenges are becoming to appear. Although we have identified several points of tension, the integration does not become unfeasible.