[Sigia-l] Agile, Scrum and UX?

[Adrian Howard]

> On 20 Mar 2015, at 18:33, Tom Donehower <tdonehower at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> For those of you out there who are or have been part of a SCRUM for product development, where has UX and visual design fit in the process if at all?

<aside> It’s not an acronym so "Scrum" not "SCRUM". It’s a bit of a shibboleth in the agile community ;-) </aside>

> I’m trying to understand where these other roles and their deliverables fit in relation to a sprint from others past experiences.
> 
> Shared experiences, war stories, and insight greatly appreciated.

This is a few years old but still a relevant read

http://www.agileproductdesign.com/blog/emerging_best_agile_ux_practice.html

Unfortunately it’s really one of those it-depends questions I’m afraid. My advice would change quite a bit depending on the UX folk involved, the team, how good they are at actually doing Scrum, etc. 

For example at the more generative end (user research, interviewing, etc.) there is a strong overlap between UX and the Product Owner role in Scrum. So I’ve seen some teams work very effectively by having a UX person basically fill that role, or be a heavy support role for the actual PO.

On the other hand many of the most effective agile teams I’ve worked with tend to embed UX in the team. The embedded role tends towards doing a lot more facilitating of UX work by the whole team, as well as doing hands-on work.

If you can talk a bit more about any particular issues you’re having I might be able to give some more specific advice.

For further reading have a Google around "Agile UX" & "Lean UX". The Lean UX stuff grew out of folk applying UXish things in Lean Startup context — but it’s bigger than that now, being used in lots of non-startup contexts, and is a good fit for agile.

Book wise I’d at least glance at these:

* Agile User Experience Design, Diana Brown - This is great for UX folk wanting to grok agile more, and has several case studies on agile/ux teams. However, it doesn’t really dive deep into specific Agile UX practices. Good overview book. Especially for non-agile UX folk.

* Agile Experience Design, Lindsay Ratcliffe & Marc McNeill - Much more of a toolbox of techniques/approaches book. The last third-ish of the book is basically a list of techniques. There’s some stuff I’d niggle with in here. Especially on some of the ways they talk about Agile - but it’s kinda hair-splitting stuff if you’re just getting started ;-)

* User-Centered Agile Methods, Hugh Beyer — This is more of a UX-person coming to Agile book, than an Agile folk adopting UX book (if you see what I mean). My personal approach is a little bit different from Hugh’s - but there’s definitely stuff worth thinking about here. If you’re dealing with a more traditional UCD group then this would be very approachable for them.

* Lean UX, Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden - "The" book on Lean UX. Good introductory read on Lean UX, but can only do so much for the size of book. It’s also a bit light on some of the more generative user research approaches from my personal perspective. Still a useful read though.

* UX for Lean Startups, Laura Klein - I think this fills some gaps in Jeff & Josh’s Lean UX book. Especially on the user research side. I also think it’s a *much* more approachable read to non-UX folk. Something that you can give to the rest of the team.

* Lean Customer Development, Cindy Alvarez - Again, something very approachable to non-UX folk in language and tone. Like Jeff, Josh’s & Laura’s books it doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about integration with agile teams specifically, but the techniques fit in with agile approaches very well (indeed, agile approaches are required for this sort of UX approach to work well.). This is more relevant to PO folk.

Just on the topic of usability testing, the stuff in Steve Krug’s "Rocket Surgery Made Easy" fits in really nicely with agile - and very approachable for non-UX folk.

I’d also keep an eye on Tomer Sharon’s upcoming Lean User Research book from Rosenfeld http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/lean-user-research-product-development/

Outside of books I’d also take a poke at these two online communities.

* Balanced Team (balancedteam.org) - This community grew out of some UX and Agile folk trying to play nice together, but has a bit of a broader scope now. They do online/offline meetups, conferences, and the mailing list is as useful as respectful as this one is IMHO. I first heard about the stuff Janice Fraser et al were doing around Lean UX here, long before it was cool and sexy ;-)

* https://groups.yahoo.com/groups/agile-usability/info - This is AFAIK the oldest community of folk that have been poking at Agile & UX. Almost no traffic now, but has a bunch of smart folk subscribed and some gold in the archives.

To be honest I think plugging into the online communities around agile ux & lean ux will be more helpful to you than the books. Despite folk having been poking around this for more than ten years now, not enough of it has been written down.

Also, while I don’t really actively curate these anymore you may find some of the links on

    https://pinboard.in/u:adrianh/t:leanux
    https://pinboard.in/u:adrianh/t:agileux
    https://pinboard.in/u:adrianh/t:agile+ux

of interest (although the relevance to the topic may, on occasion, need filtering through my brain first ;-)

<biased>
Oh yes. I may put out a newsletter on the topic occasionally that might be useful. Previous issues / subscription at http://is.gd/HNz5TN
</biased>

> Would also be curious if you've used a scrum tool you would recommend like
> Pivotal Tracker or Axosoft OnTime.

Have happily used Pivotal, Jira & Trello on projects. Have also worked on projects where they’ve been a terrible hinderance. They’re just tools. I tend towards starting with post-it notes or index cards, and move to digital tools if/when necessary.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Adrian

-- 
adrianh at quietstars.com / +44 (0)7752 419080 / @adrianh / quietstars.com
(CSSTWP.com the product team certification programme you can trust! ;-)