Farley FERNANDES^a,b,  André NEVES^b

^a Digital Media, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
^b Design, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

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Abstract
Agile paradigm, due to its historical proximity with software’s world, finds itself mostly connected only with some areas within design field, such as Interaction Design and Usability. This is the reason why the scope of this investigation will try to widen it to Design Thinking, which is underexplored nowadays and will enable us to focus more on conceptual phases of product creation. A really relevant theme from the design and agile conjunction is Little Design Up-Front, LDUF, which corresponds to the minimum amount of design to be developed in each project cycle in order to prevent waste generation in the future. In spite of its mentioned relevance throughout literature, this issue is still not addressed in a full methodical form by design. We hypothesize that it can be addressed through the exploitation of a theoretical foundation for LDUF in three dimensions: Lean Thinking, Incremental Innovation and Design Thinking. Here we will develop a theoretical comparative analysis within this framework, which will enable to come up with preliminary theoretical implications for design field in further studies regarding Little Design Up-Front. This study is part of an ongoing larger research that aims to promote strategic alignment between design activity and the context of agile software development.

Keywords
Design thinking; design methods; agile methodology; incremental innovation; lean thinking.