Design Thinking Use in Agile Software Projects: Software Developers’

Perception

Edna Dias Canedo

1 a

, Ana Carolina Dos Santos Pergentino

, Angelica Toffano Seidel Calazans

Frederico Viana Almeida

, Pedro Henrique Teixeira Costa

and Fernanda Lima

Department of Computer Science, University of Bras

ılia (UnB), P.O. Box 4466, Bras

ılia – DF, CEP 70910-900, Brazil

University Center – UniCEUB, Bras

ılia – DF, Brazil

Keywords:

Design Thinking, Agile Teams, Requirement Engineering, Software Development Process, Software

Developers’ Perception.

Abstract:

Only recently the application of the Design Thinking (DT) in agile development has begun to be researched.

Thus, this research aims to analyze information collected from agile software developers concerning their

perceptions about applying DT methods and tools in agile development. An online survey was submitted to

agile teams from Brazilian software organizations and a total of 59 answers were obtained. Results reveal

that the most commonly used techniques during the development process are brainstorming and prototyping.

In requirement elicitation, the techniques most used by the practitioners are interviews with users and proto-

typing. The study concludes that practitioners are already using many DT techniques, tools and methods in

software development activities. Furthermore, they acknowledge that DT practice in requirement elicitation

could contribute to delivering product quality to the end-user since design thinking techniques could prevent

failure to understand requirements prior to implementation.

1 INTRODUCTION

Requirement engineering (RE) has developed new

approaches through recent years regarding system

needs. It is acknowledged that there are many man-

uals and reference guides concerning how to manage

requirements in the process of software development.

Although, according to Femmer and Vogelsang (Fem-

mer and Vogelsang, 2019) it is perceptible in the prac-

tical ﬁeld that there are some problems in following

normative rules, such as no contextualization, lack

of solutions (incompleteness) or not being clear why

certain criteria do not ﬁt in the good quality ranking.

Dealing with guidance insufﬁciencies, there are sim-

ple workarounds to manage a lack of applicability of

overall normative rules. It is very common to solve

problems quickly using face-to-face communication,

which also facilitates the understanding of needs in

real-time. But these are not possible methods in all

software development processes (Femmer and Vogel-

sang, 2019).

According to Knauss (Knauss, 2019), in a wide

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2159-339X

project, with multiple agile teams, it is noticeable that

there are no means of integration and synchroniza-

tion enough to suppress all problems that may ap-

pear during development. Iteration, although helped

substantially the performance enhancement in prod-

uct delivery, also causes constant changing features,

which inﬂuences in original system requirement. Sys-

tem requirements are detailed and could be modiﬁed

over development. Agile development is dynamic and

demands ﬂexibility during all process, which leads

many developers to criticize or ignore requirements

(Knauss, 2019), (Masood et al., 2017),(Kusters et al.,

2017).

When requirements are not followed, and there are

constant changes during development, it becomes dif-

ﬁcult to maintain also the knowledge about the code.

And so, the challenge of passing this knowledge en-

ters the list of difﬁculties that may delay develop-

ing (Knauss, 2019). But even recognizing that there

are eventually problems through continuous develop-

ment, how do programmers work and feel using the

methodology? Are they satisﬁed with the hierarchy

that was supposed to be more horizontal but can ap-

pear as the same vertical pressure as always? Which

Canedo, E., Pergentino, A., Calazans, A., Almeida, F., Costa, P. and Lima, F.

Design Thinking Use in Agile Software Projects: Software Developers’ Perception.

DOI: 10.5220/0009387502170224

In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2020) - Volume 2, pages 217-224

ISBN: 978-989-758-423-7

217

are the workarounds daily used to deal with the fast

movement of needs in a project?

The Design Thinking practiced nowadays has be-

gun in business to improve business innovative pro-

cesses. DT is a multidisciplinary and human cen-

tered methodology that focuses on a target group’s

needs. It is possible because this approach is de-

sign oriented. Consequently, DT looks forward to

the people’s experience and well-being (Hehn et al.,

2019). Just as innovation itself, the DT approach can

be applied in multiple sectors because of its great ef-

fectiveness and adaptability and also its high poten-

tial. Nevertheless, only recently, this methodology is

being widely employed in software products devel-

oping with a global scope (Hehn and Uebernickel,

2018). However the same fact is not a completely

valid afﬁrmation in Brazil since initiatives in this area

have been slowly promoted in universities and mar-

ket (de Carvalho Souza and Silva, 2015),(de Almeida

et al., 2018). Design Thinking has high adaptability,

and Software Engineering can seize it especially dur-

ing software requirements elicitation, which is part of

the software development process as well as the DT

(de Carvalho Souza and Silva, 2015).

In this paper, we examined how agile software de-

velopment teams use DT techniques during develop-

ment process activities and which beneﬁts and facili-

ties were discovered over activity execution with DT.

Besides, we collected the perception of agile teams’

practitioners, regarding their satisfaction over DT use

along stages of the development process. Thus, the

main contributions of the paper are: 1. Identiﬁcation

of the Design Thinking phase most used by agile soft-

ware development teams; 2. Identiﬁcation of most

used techniques in requirements elicitation; 3. Per-

ception of agile teams regarding the advantages of us-

ing DT along with software development projects; 4.

Evaluation of the use of the requirement speciﬁcation

document during functionalities implementation.

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED

WORKS

To examine difﬁculties related to the methodology,

we must recapture the concept of Design Thinking

(DT). DT was formulated to develop innovative so-

lutions with a human-centered approach (Brown and

Katz, 2009). DT has an iterative proﬁle and intends

to develop and test potential solutions, until attain-

ing the ideal solution. DT is a methodology indi-

cated when complex problems that cannot be properly

deﬁned need to be solved, seeking to understand hu-

man needs bonded to the problem, placing the ques-

tion from a human point of view, conceiving ideas

through brainstorming and applying them in proto-

types and tests. As a more practical approach, it is

possible to save development resources, because the

project is planned and tested before the implementa-

tion so that efﬁciently it will not result in unnecessary

rework (Plattner et al., 2009).

Constant iteration in the Design Thinking process

follows the agile development concept of acting in

feedback cycles to increase efﬁciency. The delivered

product after each phase will not be necessarily done,

the team must comprehend the product impact and

proceed to develop it cyclically. The intention is to

reach the ideal, a product closest to the need of the

ﬁnal user.

In order to reach it there will be many changes in

what was ﬁrst deﬁned: empathy will increase due to

what is observed in interaction between user and sys-

tem, problems will be reframed to include new dis-

covers in empathic comprehension, ideas will adapt

to solve those new problems, prototypes will readapt

to verify if those new ideas indeed are functional,

and tests will point out efﬁciency from all process

that will renew themselves consecutively (Pereira and

de FSM Russo, 2018). According to Liedtka and

Ogilvie (Liedtka and Ogilvie, 2011), DT is associable

with 4 basic questions: 1. What is? - explores reality

in present; 2. What if? - looks toward the future; 3.

What wows? - what impresses helps decision mak-

ing; 4. What works? - what inserts us into the market.

There are 10 essential tools to answer these questions,

that are necessary to create new possibilities and re-

duce risks while having to handle uncertainty from

growth and innovation (Liedtka and Ogilvie, 2011),

(Moggridge, 2007):

1. Visualization: trying to set the situation from a

visual perspective, to naturally materialize possi-

bilities;

2. Journey Mapping: perform navigation from the

consumer’s point of view;

3. Value Chain Analysis: a chain value is a set of

activities to be executed to deliver a valuable prod-

uct to the market(Urbig and Verlage, 2003). It is

essential to evaluate the user’s chain value to de-

ﬁne if the product is valuable;

4. Mind Mapping: a tool to envision thoughts, that

can be the problem or ideas, and their connec-

tions. It starts with a core term and the associa-

tion of ideas connected to that term (Moggridge,

2007);

5. Brainstorming: session of solution creation, it

occurs in the ideation phase, where diverse ideas

rise to solve the problem deﬁned;

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218

6. Concept Development: attach an alternative so-

lution compatible with the innovation compo-

nents.

7. Assumption Testing: isolating and testing the

key assumptions that will drive the success or fail-

ure of a concept;

8. Rapid Prototyping: expressing a new concept in

a tangible form for exploration, testing, and re-

ﬁnement;

9. Customer Co-creation: enrolling customers to

participate in creating the solution that best meets

their needs;

10. Learning Launch: creating an affordable exper-

iment that lets customers experience the new so-

lution over an extended period of time, to test key

assumptions with market data.

Complementing the list, we present some of the tools

most applied nowadays when employing the DT ap-

proach. The human-centered perspective is widely

seen in all tools, it is noticeable the search to cap-

ture the whole story, creating a product that ﬁts in

the user’s context, not only delivers functionality but

brings facilities to the practical experience as a whole.

The tools are (Schwaber, 2005; Bitner et al., 2008;

Morelli and Tollestrup, 2006; Long, 2009; Bittner and

Shoury, 2019; Bitner et al., 2008):

1. Sprint: originated in Scrum, an Agile Develop-

ment methodology in which the project is sepa-

rated into cycles. Each cycle is a Sprint, that rep-

resents a period throughout which a set of activi-

ties should be executed. It is also the time interval

deﬁned to iteration: at the end of each Sprint, a

meeting occurs intending to set feedback and plan

the next Sprint (Schwaber, 2005).

2. Blueprint Service: is a graphic way to describe

the service processes. It is a tool composed of

all sub-process that deﬁne interactions and it de-

scribes characteristics of the service so detailed

that is possible to implement and maintain it (Bit-

ner et al., 2008).

3. Story Telling: is about understanding all ways to

execute an action or service to be built. It is an

analytical phase that allows a realistic event nar-

ration, highlighting main problems, interaction er-

rors and emotional factors regarding the system

(Morelli and Tollestrup, 2006).

4. Storyboard: is about representing use cases

through a sequential narrative, allowing better vi-

sualization of a story, as a visual tool to support

storytelling.

5. Personas: refer to a technique of proﬁling po-

tential users through observation. Fictional char-

acters are created to represent an existing social

group, and so their point of view builds a story-

telling (Long, 2009).

6. Empathy Map: is a creativity method useful

to summarize all staff considerations, recognize

clients’ needs and receive new customers percep-

tions (Bittner and Shoury, 2019).

7. Insight Cards: after immersion insights appear.

Cards are used to describe data collected in the

research, during these insights.

8. Pitch: is a fast presentation of the business propo-

sition to the potential customer or partner, quickly

made in 2 to 3 minutes. It is a common way to

connect investors and entrepreneurs.

9. CSD Matrix: composed by Certainties, Supposi-

tion, and Doubts, the CSD matrix gathers all dif-

ferent team members’ perspectives, by organizing

in these three sections important data to develop,

avoiding discussion and centering all possible ob-

stacles.

10. Prototype: is not only a tool but considered a

whole stage in the Design Thinking process. Pro-

jecting a visual preview of systems and their inter-

actions allows visualization, essential to the De-

sign Thinking process.

2.1 Design Thinking Methods in

Requirement Elicitation

The software community noticed over the past years

how the world is constantly changing, quickly devel-

oping and demanding a growing value in acquisitions,

and how this scenario applies to the software ﬁeld.

Traditional requirement engineering, that in its ma-

jority includes requirements elicitation, analyses and

negotiation, speciﬁcation and validation stages, is al-

ready not enough to suppress these demands. Now a

context immersion is required (Vetterli et al., 2013a).

A conﬂict exists regarding the way Requirement En-

gineering and agile software development deﬁne the

involvement among the user.

The agile software development tends to a signif-

icant effort in the software implementation phase, de-

mands user involvement along the development pro-

cess instead of having rigorous documentation, that

is how requirement engineering intends to decrease

this involvement after the initial mapping. Despite the

agile development oriented by users’ descriptions, its

capture is from a perspective of functional and non-

functional requirements, even with user’s orientation

Design Thinking Use in Agile Software Projects: Software Developers’ Perception

219

and qualiﬁed professionals in team, it is, however,

complex to capture what is necessary entirely. Con-

fronted with this dilemma, the search to discover a

form to bring agile features inside the requirement

engineering universe, which includes the elicitation

phase, besides suppressing the own challenges that al-

ready exist in the methodology (Vetterli et al., 2013a).

Some researches denote ways to solve this

methodology use problem: Design Thinking with an

initial practice in requirement engineering, elicitation

and prototyping, and support user engagement, as ag-

ile methodology defends (Vetterli et al., 2013a).The

connection between DT and agile methodology is so

evident, that literature highlights their similarity, as

in (Higuchi and Nakano, 2017). A project manage-

ment model that covers the whole software develop-

ment process, through the Design Thinking and ag-

ile methodology approach combination can be used

as a requirement elicitation method in agile method-

ology, mainly in applications that require creativity

(Higuchi and Nakano, 2017). Both Design Think-

ing and agile software development methodology of-

fer competitive advantages, in product differentiation

and cost estimative efﬁciency (Higuchi and Nakano,

2017). Besides, both approaches contain common-

alities, that reinforce their use jointly (Higuchi and

Nakano, 2017).

Hehn et al. (Hehn et al., 2018) present a tutorial to

create an understanding about what Design Thinking

is and how it can be integrated with existing Require-

ments Engineering practices. Hehn et al. (Hehn et al.,

2019) suggest three approaches for tailoring and inte-

grating Design Thinking and Requirements Engineer-

ing with complementary synergies. Canedo and da

Costa (Canedo and da Costa, 2018) present an expe-

rience report using the technique of Design Thinking

applied in the modernization of two real systems.

3 STUDY SETTINGS

The main goal of this research is to build a broad

comprehension of how practitioners use the design

thinking tools, as well as to characterize how they no-

tice their signiﬁcance along the software development

process. Here we focus on both public and private or-

ganizations. We conducted a study to investigate the

following research questions:

RQ.1: What are the Design Thinking techniques used

by the organization during the software devel-

opment process?

RQ.2: What are the Design Thinking techniques used

in requirement elicitation in a software devel-

opment project?

RQ.3: What phase in Design Thinking is widely

adopted in organizations along the develop-

ment process?

RQ.4: What tools are mostly used by practitioners in

the software development process?

RQ.5: What are the obtained results with design

thinking use inside organizations as a support

method in real software development projects?

3.1 Developer Survey

To answer these research questions, we used a sur-

vey approach, composed of 33 closed questions and

01 open question, aimed to collect information from

practitioners concerning their perceptions about ap-

plying Design Thinking methods and tools in their

work environment. Besides, we collected data re-

garding the practitioner’s time of experience, what

function they executed inside the development pro-

cess using Design Thinking methodology, and which

DT phases they actively participated.

The survey also contained a question section ad-

dressed to developers to collect data related to De-

sign Thinking employed in requirement elicitation

and how the developer keeps up with methodology’s

iteration. The questionnaire was available through the

Google Forms tool, within the period of 01/08/2019 to

20/11/2019. It was distributed to both public and pri-

vate Information Technology (IT) companies . A total

of 59 answers was obtained. And that was considered

the research scope. Section 4 presents the results ob-

tained with the survey and a discussion thereof.

4 SURVEY RESULTS AND

DISCUSSIONS

In this section we present the main ﬁndings of our re-

search, answering the general research questions we

investigate and we expose a discussion of the obtained

results. Regarding the practitioners’ proﬁle in the or-

ganizations, including age, degree, and experience in

software development projects, 25.4% of practition-

ers are in the age range of 31 to 36 years old, 18.6%

are between 26 to 30 years old, 22% are within 37

to 42 years old, 15.3% between 42 to 47 years old,

and 8.5% are between 42 to 47 years old. Beyond

this, 22% of the respondents are graduated, 25.4%

have a specialization degree, 28.8% are master stu-

dents, 10.2% are PhD students, 5.1% are masters and

6.8% are undergraduate students.

Regarding the professional experience time in the

Information Technology ﬁeld, 23.7% of the practi-

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tioners have between 7 and 10 years of experience,

18.6% work longer than 21 years in the area, 15.3%

have between 11 and 15 years of practice, 13.6% be-

tween 16 and 20 years, 11.9% have between four and

six years and just 8.5% have less than a year of ex-

perience. Among these results, it is possible to con-

clude that the majority of the responders that use the

Design Thinking methodology is composed of expe-

rienced professionals, relatively young, mostly under

50 years old.

Regarding participation in software development

projects with an agile team, 76.3% from the practi-

tioners afﬁrmed to be currently in a project, 15.3%

asserted that are not participating currently, but al-

ready joined, and only 8.5% declared to know the

agile methods but never been in a project using ag-

ile methodology. Concerning the organization’s per-

formance context in which the professional partici-

pated/participates in software development projects in

agile teams, 42.1% from practitioners works in private

organizations, 43.9% in research project, 31.6% work

in Federal Public Administration (FPA), 19.3% work

in public companies (State-owned enterprises), 8.8%

in open-source software projects.

4.1 RQ.1

Related to the question RQ.1 we identiﬁed that 80.8%

of practitioners applied prototyping, 53.8% Brain-

storming, and 42.3% interviews. With lower par-

ticipation are the methods CSD matrix (7.7%) and

Moodboard (3.8%), as presented in Table 1. This

ratiﬁes partial ﬁndings from authors as Souza et al

(Souza et al., 2017) that recognized Brainstorming

as the most cited technique. Correia et al. (Correa

et al., 2018) classiﬁed prototyping, brainstorming, in-

terview and other methods used in the development

process. From these results, it is perceptible that the

DT techniques applied during the software develop-

ment process are used as a group in the same DT

stage.

4.2 RQ.2

Concerning the question RQ.2, it was observed that

73.1% utilize prototyping, 61.5% Interviews, and

50% Brainstorming. The lower use rates belong to

CSD Matrix (7.7%) and Blueprint Service (7.7%), as

represented in the table’s second column 1. Authors

as Lira and Silva (Lira de Carvalho Souza and Silva,

2015) and Vetterli et al. (Vetterli et al., 2013a) identi-

ﬁed prototyping as a main Design Thinking method

in requirement elicitation. Canedo and da Costa

(Canedo and da Costa, 2018) presents an experience

report about prototyping use in two software develop-

ment projects and effectiveness in using the prototyp-

ing technique in requirements elicitation and systems

interface elaboration.

4.3 RQ.3

Related to the question RQ.3 were presented in the

survey, the phases as presented by Plattner et al. (Plat-

tner et al., 2009) and it was observed that all identiﬁed

phases (Immersion, Empathy, Deﬁnition, Ideation,

Prototyping, and Tests) are utilized in a representative

way at organizations responding. Figure 1 presents

the identiﬁed percentages, which shows that Prototyp-

ing (75%) and Empathy (64.3%) are the most repre-

sentative. Important to reinforce that the other phases

were also adopted: Immersion (57.1%), Deﬁnition

(60.7%), Ideation (57.1%), and Tests (53.6%).

Figure 1: Design Thinking Phases Adopted in Software De-

velopment Projects.

4.4 RQ.4

There were few answers to question RQ.4. We

present in the survey a list of tools used in the soft-

ware development process (Schwaber, 2005),(Bitner

et al., 2008),(Morelli and Tollestrup, 2006),(Long,

2009),(Bittner and Shoury, 2019),(Bitner et al., 2008).

Only 6 from the 59 respondents identiﬁed any tools

used. These are the ones mentioned: Adobe XD (2

respondent), Quant-UX, Kanban Virtual, Mind Map

Free, Ms-Word, Bizagi, Sketch, Axure, BonitaSoft,

and Pencil, as shown in Figure 2. From the tools

mentioned only Axure is cited in Souza et al. (Souza

et al., 2017) systematic review. This allows us to infer

that industrial practice identiﬁes different tools than

the academy.

Figure 2: Design Thinking Tools Used by Practitioners in

Software Development Projects.

Design Thinking Use in Agile Software Projects: Software Developers’ Perception

221

Table 1: Design Thinking Methods and Tools Applied in Software Development Process versus Applied in Requirement

Elicitation.

Techniques Percentage in Software Development Percentage in Requirement Elicitation

Prototyping 80.8% 73.1%

Brainstorming 53.8% 50.0%

Interview 42.3% 61.5%

Mind Map 38.5% 38.5%

Personas 38.5% 38.5%

Story Telling 34.6% 15.5%

Storyboard 30.8% 30.8%

Customer Journey Map 19.2% 26.9%

Insight Cards 15.4% 19.2%

Role Sprint 15.4% 11.5%

Empathy Map 15.4% 23.1%

Pitch 15.4% 15.4%

Blueprint Service 11.5% 7.7%

CSD Matrix 7.7% 7.7%

Moodboard 3.8% 0%

Interesting to mark that, according to Chasanidou et

al. (Chasanidou et al., 2015), a large number of de-

sign techniques and tools facilitate the DT innovation

process. Selecting correct methods is essential mainly

during the initial phases. Comprehending which and

how are applied those DT methods and tools in Soft-

ware Engineering provide the recognition that alterna-

tives apply in the software development process. The

results found show that there are still not a large num-

ber of software tools supporting assist DT methodol-

ogy use along the software development process.

4.5 RQ.5

Regarding question RQ.5 we identiﬁed the following

aspects, all represented in Figure 3: Regarding soft-

ware development:

• Had a Designer in the team during all DT phases

increases the development team efﬁciency (95%

of the developers) (Q21);

• DT methodology use increases the developed

product quality (88% of the developers) (Q24);

• DT enables the creation of a friendly interface

(82% of the practitioners) (Q16);

• DT improves the information ﬂow deﬁnition

(79% of the practitioners) (Q15);

• Interaction inside the development team during

the project was satisfying (79% of the developers)

(Q25);

• DT use supports the entire development process

(75% of the practitioners) (Q20);

• DT allows a suitable architectural deﬁnition (58%

of the developers) (Q17).

Regarding requirements:

• From prototypes it is possible to identify mistakes

in requirement understanding (89% of the practi-

tioners) (Q18);

• DT improves the system’s requirements elicita-

tion (86% of the respondents) (Q14).

Regarding Tools:

• Recognize as Positive the experience of using pro-

totypes to support project functionalities develop-

ment (96% of the developers) (Q22);

• Recognize as positive the visualization of the sys-

tem’s components, buttons, and screens through

prototypes regarding the efﬁciency of their

project’s deliveries (91% of the developers)

(Q23);

• DT facilitates implementation activities, once that

prototypes are validated with the customer (88%

of the practitioners) (Q19).

The survey also enabled the identiﬁcation of the

following results about the advantages of using the

methodology Design Thinking in an agile software

development project. The practitioners mentioned

in the open question that Design Thinking enables:

”Allow previous planning of what needs to be devel-

oped”,”Improve customer reliability”, ”Improve end-

user participation (active product participant)”, ”Re-

duce risk and investment in unnecessary product or

service”; ”Promote the validation and veriﬁcation of

new customer experiences, especially for the user ex-

perience (UX) and user interface (UI) area”. These

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222

Figure 3: Developers’ Perception about Applying Design

Thinking in Software Development Projects.

ﬁndings conﬁrm the research results performed by

Pereira (Pereira, 2018) and Vetterli et al. (Vetterli

et al., 2013b).

5 THREATS TO VALIDITY

Regarding the internal validity of the survey, we con-

ducted a review of the questionnaire questions in or-

der to mitigate the threats (Wainer, 2007). In addition,

three other researchers validated the survey questions.

Regarding external validity, the survey participants

might not be representative of the general population

of software developers, the generalizability of our sur-

vey results might be limited. To mitigate this risk, we

advertised our survey through various channels to a

large audience. Having gathered data from software

developers from various organizations, and with dif-

ferent levels of software development experience, we

believe that our sample is fairly representative of soft-

ware developers of agile teams and that it provides an

interesting perspective. Participants could freely de-

cide whether to participate in the study or not (self-

selection). They were informed about the survey’s

topics and an estimated duration for the participation.

This could have biased the selection of participants as

only participants who could spare enough time might

have participated. We tried to mitigate this risk by

advertising through various channels.

Regarding the validity of conclusion, according to

Travassos and Amaral (Travassos and Amaral, 2002)

is related to the ability to reach a correct conclusion

about the relationships between treatment and the re-

sult of the research. To mitigate this risk the results

presented were analyzed by three researchers. We

recognize that there is no way to fully mitigate this

threat by considering only the number of survey par-

ticipants, but we consider that results that have been

partially ratiﬁed by other research could be consid-

ered as indicative of practitioners’ perception of DT.

In the future, we will conduct the survey with a larger

population of participants to ratify these ﬁndings.

6 CONCLUSION

Design Thinking techniques and supporting tools

used along the agile software project development

have been widely adopted by professionals in the soft-

ware industry. However, there are not many practical

examples of the technique applied in the literature, by

using real software projects, and also not many em-

pirical studies that validate the results of using DT in

real software systems.

This work investigates Design Thinking practice

applied to real projects, and which are its beneﬁts

according to the perception of practitioners in some

software development companies. 76.3% of the sur-

vey participants work or already worked in agile soft-

ware development projects applying DT methodology

or DT tools and the most used technique is prototyp-

ing followed by brainstorming.

In requirement elicitation, the most used tech-

nique is also prototyping, followed by users’ inter-

views. Besides, professionals reported that prototyp-

ing allows mistakes identiﬁcation in requirements un-

derstanding before implementation, which prevents

possible problems among project stakeholders.

The beneﬁts observed in DT methodology ap-

plied to software development use are: 1. Enhanc-

ing the requirement elicitation process; 2. Allowing

errors identiﬁcation in requirements understanding

from prototyping; 3. Easying implementation once

that prototypes are validated directly with clients. Al-

though agile team developers do not sympathize with

documentation, according to the survey participants,

practitioners still use requirement speciﬁcation doc-

uments to implement software functionalities, even

when using DT techniques in requirement elicitation.

As future work, it is intended to investigate and

monitor the main challenges faced by practitioners

in software development teams when using Design

Thinking, as well as which are their suggestions to

adopt the methodology widely in real contexts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research work has the support of the Research

Support Foundation of the Federal District (FAPDF)

research grant 05/2018.

Design Thinking Use in Agile Software Projects: Software Developers’ Perception

223

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