Task Allocation Between UX Specialists and Developers in Agile Software Development Projects

Synchronizing efforts between developers and user experience (UX) specialists is one of the major challenges in agile UX work. In this paper, we report results of a study conducted over a release cycle of six agile software development projects in five companies, considering the task allocation and cooperation in the team. Team members (N = 31), including product owners, UX specialists, and developers, reported weekly on the UX-related tasks they had contributed to and whether the UX specialist had participated. We identified three forms of cooperation: minimal, product owner-UX specialist, and developer-UX specialist. Our study suggests that for projects operating in the minimal cooperation mode, the collaboration concentrates on the user interface (UI) design, while other aspects of UX work are downplayed. At the same time, many UX-related tasks were successfully handled by developers alone. Therefore, to support UX work integration, we suggest a task-oriented integration approach for projects with minimal UX resources.