Overview of Contextual Inquiry

This is an overview of a software development method called contextual inquiry. It is based loosely on the book Contextual Design, by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt (Morgan Kaufmann, 1998), the pioneers of the method.

Contextual inquiry is only one piece of a larger approach to software development called contextual design. The general idea is that software will be better designed if the people who create it understand the context in which it will be used. I elaborate on this below.

The perspective I take here is that of an IT project team in a corporate environment. Obviously software efforts take place in other environments, and contextual inquiry can be used there as well, but here I'll focus on an IT project team. The assumptions, therefore, are that we're developing an application for an internal client, that we as the project team don't know much if anything at all about how the client goes about its work, we need to learn about the work in question in order to produce a successful application, etc.

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