  Context: User-Centered Design and Agile methodologies focus on human issues.
Nevertheless, agile methodologies focus on contact with contracting customers
and generating value for them. Usually, the communication between end users and
the agile team is mediated by customers. However, they do not know the problems
end users face in their routines. Hence, UX issues are typically identified
only after the implementation, during user testing and validation. Objective:
Aiming to improve the understanding and definition of the problem in agile
projects, this research investigates the practices and difficulties experienced
by agile teams during the development of data science and process automation
projects. Also, we analyze the benefits and the teams' perceptions regarding
user participation in these projects. Method: We collected data from four agile
teams in an academia-industry collaboration focusing on delivering data science
and process automation solutions. Therefore, we applied a carefully designed
questionnaire answered by developers, scrum masters, and UX designers. In
total, 18 subjects answered the questionnaire. Results: From the results, we
identify practices used by the teams to define and understand the problem and
to represent the solution. The practices most often used are prototypes and
meetings with stakeholders. Another practice that helped the team to understand
the problem was using Lean Inceptions. Also, our results present some specific
issues regarding data science projects. Conclusion: We observed that end-user
participation can be critical to understanding and defining the problem. They
help to define elements of the domain and barriers in the implementation. We
identified a need for approaches that facilitate user-team communication in
data science projects and the need for more detailed requirements
representations to support data science solutions.
