Tool Proposal for Recommending Design Thinking Techniques in Software Development

Abstract

Design Thinking (DT) has been incorporated into software processes by teams from startups to large companies, used in problem exploration fostering innovative solutions, and integrated into agile methods to satisfy the real stakeholders’ needs. DT places the customer needs up-front and helps to empathize with users, examining their behaviors, and producing outcomes focused on users’ demand. A set of techniques, like personas and user journey, can be used to support this human-centered approach. Selecting which technique to use might be challenging since factors such as the application scenario, stakeholder engagement level and previous knowledge of the problem-to-be-solved may vary from case to case. In our previous work we presented a DT session conducted to better understand the need for a recommendation tool, followed by a requirements elicitation activity in which we defined how the tool should work, and an early evaluation of the initial tool low-fidelity prototypes. Inspired by the Design Science Research method, in this article we extend our previous work by furthering what we performed in the tool’s definition process. We included in this work a requirements refining activity through high-level fidelity prototypes, and a requirements validation activity through a questionnaire-based feedback collection with professionals who have experience on the use of DT in software development. Our results show that our proposal offers an useful and easy to use tool to recommend DT techniques with the potential to support those professionals who apply DT in requirements engineering by suggesting techniques that are the best fit to the declared context.

Using Design Thinking to break social barriers: An experience report with former inmates

“…Parizi et al 53 proposed Helius, a system that helps decision‐making based on the experience and evaluations of professionals regarding the use of DT techniques. The authors evaluated the proposed tool against existing ones and concluded that Helius innovates by considering the professionals' collaborations when feeding the recommendation algorithms.…”

Reducing Challenges in Design Thinking Adoption Using Intrapreneurship and a Learning Environment

“…They must develop solutions to solve the real needs of users and customers, i.e., solutions that customers want (Edison et al, 2015;Pereira et al, 2021). Therefore, user-centered approaches are increasingly being applied in the conception of software products in teams of different sizes (Parizi et al, 2022) because these approaches prioritize the identification of needs and the involvement of real users in the product design process (Carrol & Casselman, 2019) rather than just refining previously defined software requirements (Signoretti et al, 2020). This is important because it is widely recognized that real users should validate business ideas from the very beginning of their conception (Hokkanen & Leppänen, 2015).…”

“…Meanwhile, the challenge related to the small number of professionals with knowledge of DT can be justified by the difficulty of implementing the ideas and concepts of the approach and acquiring new skills, considering the large number of available tools for DT (Carlgren et al, 2016). Parizi et al (2022) conducted a systematic mapping of the application of DT in software development, and no studies were identified focusing on establishing alternatives to overcome resistance to using DT.…”