Reimagining Participatory Agile Development in Community-Industry Partnerships

Paper Title

Reimagining Participatory Agile Development in Community-Industry Partnerships

Publication Info

• Topic area: Participatory design and Agile development in community-industry collaborations.
• Keywords: Agile development, participatory design, community-industry partnerships, social resilience, expertise, disagreement, accountability, COVID-19, community health workers, technology for social good.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Agile development methods prioritize product efficiency and profitability over community needs, often leading to participatory failures in community-industry collaborations.
• Significance: Addressing this issue is critical for creating technologies that genuinely support marginalized communities, particularly in crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Motivation and related work: Prior studies critique Agile’s narrow focus on technical expertise and product-centered metrics, as well as the limitations of participatory methods in addressing systemic inequities. This paper builds on these critiques to propose structural changes for more equitable partnerships.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A framework reimagining Agile development through three principles—yielding to community expertise, embracing disagreement as productive friction, and ensuring accountability through realignment.
• Novelty:
  1. Expanding the definition of expertise to include non-technical knowledge and yielding decision-making power to community partners.
  2. Introducing prefigurative timing and intentional presence to foster productive disagreement during development.
  3. Restructuring accountability mechanisms to prioritize community-defined success metrics and relational processes.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Ethnographic analysis of a two-year collaboration between a tech company and community health organizations during COVID-19.
  • Situational mapping of tensions in expertise, disagreement, and accountability.
  • Proposals for integrating participatory design principles into Agile processes, including changes to sprint planning, retrospectives, and KPI definitions.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • The project successfully developed an open-source client intake tool but failed to meet community-defined priorities, leading to the collapse of the partnership.
  • Three key tensions—expertise, disagreement, and accountability—were identified as barriers to meaningful collaboration.
• Advantage over baselines: The proposed framework addresses structural limitations in Agile development by embedding participatory principles, offering a pathway to more equitable and effective partnerships.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Data collection included interviews, focus groups, and observations of collaborative meetings between engineers, researchers, and community health workers.
  • Analysis employed interpretivist situational mapping to identify patterns of misalignment and opportunities for intervention.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Structural incentives for profit and efficiency in the tech industry may hinder adoption of the proposed principles.
  • The findings are based on a single case study and may not generalize to other forms of community-industry partnerships.
  • Future research should explore how yielding, friction, and realignment operate in diverse contexts and industries.

Summary

This paper critically examines the limitations of Agile development in community-industry partnerships, using a case study of a COVID-19 software co-development project. It identifies three tensions—expertise, disagreement, and accountability—that hinder participatory success and proposes reimagined principles to address these challenges. By yielding to community expertise, fostering productive disagreement, and realigning accountability mechanisms, the framework offers a pathway for creating technologies that prioritize social resilience and equity. While promising, the implementation of these principles requires overcoming structural barriers in the tech industry and adapting them to varied contexts.