Ginestra Ferraro: A troubled love story of integration
Channel: Society of Research Software Engineering
Date: 2022-11-17

Full title: UI/UX Design and Software Development: A troubled love story of integration – How a wide Research&Development problem is affecting Digital Humanities

A talk from the Software Development Processes 1 parallel session at RSECon2022.

Details: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/#/event/3101/submission/42
Additional Q&A: https://society-rse.org/rsecon22-qa-extra-time/

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Abstract: Although research and development (R&D) set ups share commonalities across disciplines, Digital Humanities is yet to formally adopt Research Software Engineering (RSE) roles (including UI/UX designers) consistently. 

This talk will focus on the topic of my SSI Fellowship “UI/UX Design and Software Development: A troubled love story of integration” claiming that an integrated workflow adds to existing and well-established ones, favouring shared awareness of: 

Actors across teams: roles and responsibilities 
Timeline: deadlines, milestones, and available resources 
Dependencies: when actors and timeline cross teams
I will share progress to date with the RSE UK community and reflect on some of the challenges observed in King’s Digital Lab (KDL), for instance: 

How the responsibilities of developers and designers blur together 
How changes in project lifecycles create out of synch workflows 
How frictions and bottlenecks can happen when the integration of separate workflows is not addressed during all phases of a research project
Without claiming to have solved the problem, aware that the issue is not new, this talk presents early outcomes of adopting a shared language and common glossary around integrated, yet flexible, workflows - considering three main aspects of developing digital applications: 

The research cycle (context and questions) 
The Software Development Life Cycle, as adopted in KDL 
The User Interface and User Experience design processes
Ultimately awareness and recognition of the contribution different RSE roles make to the quality of the research processes and products, remains key to a robust R&D environment.

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0:00 Speaker introduction
0:14 Talk
11:58 Q&A