Project Description

Title: Agile UCD

Author: Tina Øvad Pedersen, tina.oevad.pedersen@radiometer.dk

University: Aalborg University, Department of Electronic Systems

Company: Radiometer Medical ApS

Supervisors: Lars Bo Larsen (AAU) and Sune Yndgaard Sørensen (Radiometer)

I work as an industrial PhD student at Radiometer in Copenhagen and Radiometer develops medical devices. I work with exploring the opportunities of integrating user centered design (UCD) and agile software development. This is partly done by developing and integrating a UCD toolbox in the software department at Radiometer, and partly by training the software developers in conducting this type of work on their own. The aim is to support the software developers by enabling them to carry out some of the UCD work themselves. This is especially of interest for Radiometer since they, as a global provider of acute care testing devices, are under strict regulatory requirements of being in compliance with the usability standards put forward by e.g. the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

I have been working on the project for a bit more than one and a half year and during this time different preliminary steps have been made. However, the current activities are focused on experimental evaluation of the different UCD methods within Radiometer. Here the software developers have been trained in different UCD methods and the outcome and the results from this work are promising.

Given that I work in an industrial setting and I work iterative with the evaluations, action research seems to be a suitable research approach, since action research “allows the researcher to test a working hypothesisabout the phenomenon of interest by implementingand assessing change in a real-world setting” as pointed out by Lindgren et al. (2004).

References:

Lindgren, R., Henfridsson, O. and Schultze, U. 2004. Design Principles for Competence Management Systems: A synthesis of an action research study. MIS Quarterly archive. Volume 28. Issue 3. Page 435-472. Society for Information Management and The Management Information Systems Research Center Minneapolis, MN, USA.