A guide to agile development of interactive software with a “User Objectives”-driven methodology

This paper presents the InterMod methodology. By combining the widely accepted Agile Methods, Model-Driven Developments and User-Centred Design it allows us to develop high-quality interactive applications. As a main characteristic, it plans and organises the software project as a series of iterations that are guided by the User Objectives in an agile and user-centred manner. At each iteration, the software development work can be distributed to different teams according to some developmental and integration activities. Each activity is driven by models that are validated by a multidisciplinary team composed of developers and users. The requirements are incrementally collected and formalised by means of models based on user-centred design. Besides, the Semantically Enriched Human–Computer Interaction model is proposed to speed up project validation. This model enriches a human–computer interaction model with some visual characteristics and the application semantic. Thus, the enriched model provides enough information to generate prototypes so users and developers can easily validate this model. Diagram project is a real case study that is used to illustrate the application of the InterMod methodology through the whole paper.

► We integrate Agile methods, Model-Driven Developments and User Centred Design.
► We describe an agile methodology organised by means of User Objectives.
► A series of iterations guide the correct and incremental development of software.
► A Semantically Enriched Human–Computer Interaction model supports the requirements.
► The model proposed facilitates continuous evaluations with multidisciplinary teams.