[Sigia-l] UX in Agile Sprints

[Jason Valdina]

The practical alternative *IS* the lean approach.
Even non-unicorns can modify their iterative design processes to keep pace
with real-time development and prototyping.  It's certainly not impossible;
it just has some tradeoffs.  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.

One could argue that "3 sprints/6 weeks" ahead is essentially waterfall
development.  In instances where there is a pressure to close that gap (as
it sounds like your team experienced), the 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.



On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Jonathan Baker-Bates <
jonathan at bakerbates.com> wrote:

> On 11 March 2013 20:14, Jason Valdina <signal at received.com> wrote:
>
> > <snip>
> > It was meant to challenge the notion "waterfall" vs. "agile" and make the
> > case that except in truly lean contexts, the ideal (and most realistic)
> > arrangement has the UX team working on the pre-sprint planning for the
> > upcoming sprint in parallel to the current sprint.  This allows for a
> > management feedback cycle whereby user insights can be integrated and
> > addressed in the very next development cycle.
>
>
> Unless I'm missed something, I don't see what the practical alternative* to
> having UX sprints before dev sprints is. When you say "except in truly lean
> contexts" are you referring to having UX and dev sprinting on the same
> thing at the same time? In which case I would agree that's almost certainly
> impossible. We tried to keep UX at least 3 sprints ahead of dev (ie about 6
> weeks so as to have some chance of including user research and thinking
> time in some sprint), although we were constantly being dragged in closer.
>
> Jonathan
>
> * Short of hiring a team of UX/dev unicorns
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