Towards a Pattern Language to Embed UX Information in Agile Software Requirements

The concern on how to handle agile software requirements have been explored from different perspectives. User stories (US) are being used as valuable artifacts to agile teams, being a short requirement description with its details complemented by other artifacts. Recently, agile professionals have demonstrated a great interest in integrating User eXperience (UX) information into agile practices because UX is an important cross-cutting quality requirement. These professionals still face difficulties in organizing and linking the UX information to User Stories which can introduce navigational distance, which is characterized by the effort to reach an information. This paper presents a set of patterns intending to support agile teams to embed the UX information in agile software requirements. Our patterns were proposed based on a case study conducting in an industrial setting. From this study results, we found out that by organizing the requirements and other UX information the agile teams introduced navigational distances between that information and the US's bringing difficulties to accessing the information in virtual tools. These patterns describe practices to motivate agile teams to rethink their ways of organizing agile software requirements and the UX information in virtual tools to support the teams to find and retrieve the UX and requirement information easily. The practices cover the UX information in most of the abstraction layers, from the UX in more practical activities, for example in tasks, to more general UX information that can be used by several US's.