[Sigia-l] UX in Agile Sprints

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

On 11 March 2013 18:14, Tom Donehower <tdonehower at gmail.com> wrote:

> <snip>
>
> This, however has not been my reality. My reality has been UX is running in
> a more traditional waterfall and then dev uses the pre-existing UX
> deliverables in their weekly sprints as they work through the backlog.
> Which just doesn't feel right to me.
>

This was certainly one of things we experienced in a trial during which we
put UX people into Scrum teams together with front and back-end devs. To
say that it was a disaster would be hyperbole, but not *too* far off the
mark. Suffice to say that once the wheels started seriously to fall off the
capacity to actually produce defensible design work, we rolled UX out of
scrum, the product team stopped screaming, and it all got much better for
me to manage.

I should point out that we all had several days of intensive scrum training
before we went into it (and I myself became a certified ScrumAlliance Scrum
master), and we had access to an external trainer to mentor us for several
weeks afterwards. He had less to say about UX than dev though.

I wrote up our full notes on it in a blog post at the time:

http://webtorque.org/?p=1060

Jonathan

PS: We subsequently had a much better experience with Kanban agile in my
opinion, and I would choose that today if I could. However, the trauma of
"Agile" anything seems to have sent us scurrying into an amorphous, and
rather interesting, process by which we have no process at all to speak of
(and have avoided having any project managers as well).