A lean UX approach for the engineering user interfaces in the Square Kilometre Array project

Development of engineering user interfaces for a radiotelescope can greatly benefit from a Lean UX approach. In this paper we analyse the situation for the SKA project, a very large endeavour that involves dozens of agile teams, hundreds of developers and many more stakeholders, for a system whose lifespan will be several decades. The paper describes how we are establishing a Lean UX process appropriate for the current stage of the SKA project. We outline the four major challenges that need to be overcome, and that constitute our starting point for defining the overall goals characterizing the desirable process. On this basis, we present the adoption plan. The Lean UX process we envision is suitable for developing software for a very complex social and technical collaboration such as SKA where software is being developed with a quite sophisticated agile framework. Similar decisions are likely to be made on many large scientific projects that are developed with agile methods.