INTEGRATING UCD WITHIN AN AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS IN AN EDUCATIONAL SETTING

The Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board has defined 12 attributes that an institution must demonstrate graduates of its engineering program possess. We are in pursuit of the attribute Design” dealing with the students’ ability to select candidate engineering design solutions for development, with three indicators relating to how candidate solutions are selected. Our approach to teaching “Design” is based on “learning outcomes” rather than “teaching inputs”. In this paper, we describe the learning outcomes of teaching a newly proposed Integrated User Centered Design (UCD)- Agile Process in the context of a one term project course wherein teams of undergraduate students apply what they have learnt about Agile software development and User Interface (UI) design in the context of a real-world project with actual clients. The Integrated UCD-Agile Process includes upfront design of the UI in parallel with development of the functionalities, UI design specialists for each sprint and usability testing of all UI design decisions