[Sigia-l] UX in Agile Sprints

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

On 11 March 2013 21:07, Jason Valdina <signal at received.com> wrote:
<snip>

> Many teams are moving to models that allow for
> "UX and dev sprinting on the same thing at the same time"...the key
> difference being that user research is less effective and harder to
> integrate, hence the point of my presentation.
>

That was certainly a key difference, but in my experience, it most
certainly wasn't the only one. I'd say the activity of design itself was
less effective and harder to integrate. If anyone on this list has been
working in the "lean approach" in the way you describe for more than about
6 months and disagrees, I'd like to hear from them.


> UX team's process needs to be
> abridged to focus on going from sketch to prototype as much as possible, so
> that there is still time to detail key functional notes in whatever tools
> the developers are using (Jira, etc.), as well as save some bandwidth to do
> iterative testing throughout.
>

We did just that (using Jira and ScrumWorks). And it was not good. Unless
the product you are making is extremely simple, or you are willing to ship
stuff you aren't proud from a UX POV, then I don't see how you can
envision, research, think about and refine anything of any real substance
in 2 or 3 weeks without significant erosion of what the activity of user
experience design is there to do. Remember, Scrum calls for executable code
at the end of each sprint. Anything less isn't Scrum, so if you're willing
to do a "version" of it that isn't actually delivering anything at the end
of a sprint, then that's back to what you rightly call waterfall
development.

Jonathan