Examining Usability Activities in Scrum Projects – A Survey Study

Abstract: Over the past decades, usability techniques have been introduced into software development practices. At the same time many development organizations have started to use the agile development process – Scrum – to plan and organize their software projects. Little is known about how usability activities are used in Scrum projects and therefore  a survey was distributed worldwide to explore this topic. The results from the study shed new light on how IT professionals rate the usability techniques used in Scrum and if the usage of one technique is correlated with other techniques. The results indicate that the most commonly used usability technique in Scrum is workshops, followed by user stories, lo-fi prototyping, interviews and meetings with users, all used by more than half of the participants. A highly ranked usability technique by the IT professionals is formal usability evaluation with users, which is interesting since that technique is not commonly used.