Adopting Design Thinking Practices to Satisfy Customer Expectations in Agile Practices: A Case from Sri Lankan Software Development Industry

While the application of agile principles leads to better project success, some projects still fail due to insufficient understanding of client's exact requirements. Agile teams have recently started adopting Design Thinking (DT) practices to better understand what is in customers' mind. We explore suitable DT practices to satisfy customer expectations in agile teams using inductive reasoning. We first formulated a conceptual framework based on a literature review. We then conducted a set of interviews with fifteen domain experts from ten IT service organizations. Interview findings were then analyzed using the Straussian grounded theory. Customer journey, story mapping, prototypes, POC, and customer profiling were determined to be the most suitable methods to identify the needs of customers. Moreover, practicing human-centered approach through workshops, discussions, team communication, and end-user interaction through UAT were also identified to be effective. We further classified the best practices into five categories as customer's real need identification, transforming customer's real needs into pilot solutions, visualizing the pilot solution for customer feedback, idea generation for the pilot solution, and brainstorming. Based on these findings, we also derived a framework to achieve customer satisfaction through the adoption of DT in agile-base projects.