[Sigia-l] How the design process fits into the agile methodology

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org 
> [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Howard
> Sent: 20 February 2007 09:53
> To: SIGIA-L
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] How the design process fits into the 
> agile methodology
> 
> 
> On 19 Feb 2007, at 18:37, Victor Lombardi wrote:
> 
> > I've seen both. The majority of people talk about concepts like 
> > "design" and "customers" but this is where the confusion starts, 
> > because the agilists may be referring to software design and not 
> > product design, or the business client and not the end user.
> [snip]
> 
> "Customer", "Developer" and "Development Team" are other 
> phrases that get confusing. Since "Customer" can often 
> translate to "group who have final say on business value 
> related decisions" and "developer"  
> can mean anybody involved with creating the product (so 
> programmers, testers, usability folk, etc.)
> 

It's worse than that. I've encountered the word "user" referring to what
I (and I think many others on this list) would term "client." This seems
to be mostly prevalent in old-school IT shops that have a history of
making bespoke solutions for in-house clients who are (by definition)
also the users of the resulting software. Hence the phrase "user
acceptance testing" is a QA activity that has nothing to do with "user
testing" or indeed even end users. 

This has led me to have some very confusing conversations with project
managers and QA staff in the past.

Jonathan




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