Social Integration in Agile User Experience: Building Social Capital in Agile User Experience Software Teams

Abstract

As the practice of software engineering matures, project teams are leveraging the expertise of those with a background in other disciplines such as user experience. This multidisciplinary collaboration has implications on how user experience is incorporated into the software they produce. It also has consequences for the interaction within the team. This research aims to address the implications and consequences by explaining and evaluating the impact of socio-cognitive factors and governance forms on agile user experience software teams. The objective is to support multidisciplinary agile user experience software teams in managing their interaction as a means to improving how user experience knowledge is managed. Results from a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) were that: a combination of trust and shared meaning are associated with the impediment of knowledge construction and dissemination; a combination of lead governance, trust, and shared meaning are associated with knowledge dissemination; and a combination of lead governance and shared meaning are associated with the impediment of knowledge use. Review from an expert review of the Team Interaction Framework were that there are benefits to using the framework and ways to ease it use, but also limitations and anticipated challenges to its application. The findings from this research suggest that each theoretical component of the framework is relevant, but it is unclear whether the structural dimension is useful when studying agile user experience teams given environment similarity across teams. The contributions of this research are the Team Interaction Framework as a guide to evaluating the social interaction in agile user experience teams, a method for assessing the social interaction in agile user experience teams via a Team Interaction Assessment, and lightweight practices for improving the social interaction in these teams.