[Sigia-l] How the design process fits into the agile methodology, WAS Pricing the Design Process

[Tammie Hutto Egloff]

> What is interesting is when design goes through its own agile
> processes in parallel or in front of development iterations.

I was being a bit more brief in my answer than you (good job at explaining).
But yes, we do agile along with the team. The goal of the design team is to
stay just ahead of the development team. So, we're
testing/designing/refactoring the design in iterations so that we deliver
"just in time" for the development team to implement in their next iteration.
It's definitely not a "do everything up front" waterfall approach (although I
have heard arguments that waterfall is actually meant to be more iterative
than its typically implemented... but that's another discussion!). 

Whether or not this works depends on the people involved and how flexible they
are to work in this agile fashion. In some cases it'll crash and burn (which I
have seen). It could be made development centered (which I've seen on the same
team that crashed and failed). And, it can also work beautifully with a design
that changes regularly based on user feedback and is gradually molded into a
really well thought out and tested piece of software (which happened on a team
I didn't have the pleasure to work with, but I was able to watch from the
sidelines).