Diana Brown - Agile User Experience Design A Practitioners Guide to Making It Work

To understand what it means to practice an Agile form of user-centered design, it is important to have a sense of what exactly Agile means and where the term came from. Since the Agile methodology has a deep, rich history and is continually evolving, it has become the subject of many books, blogs, white papers, conference presentations, and websites, all of which have their own take on the value system and its methods. This chapter touches on only the most common terms and concepts and those that might be most relevant to a user experience practitioner. I encourage everyone to spend some time exploring the many resources that are available to get a deeper understanding of the philosophy and the various methods for applying it that have grown up along the way. It is also important to recognize that there is no one single right way to implement Agile design. At its core, Agile is a set of values to use as compass to guide a team through the production of software. Whatever process or tools are used and how they are applied are secondary to the overall goals of empowering a highly functional team as it builds great software to the delight of its end users.

Agile is a term that grew out of efforts in the 1990s to find a better development method for producing software. Traditional methods, such as the waterfall method, were starting to be recognized as a bit unwieldy. Consumers were expecting more of their software in terms of quality and functionality, and production cycles needed to change in order to create a product that would satisfy end users. Additionally, production cycles needed to be able to adapt and accommodate the reality of shifting requirements. Waterfall development makes it especially challenging for teams to respond to issues, mostly because it is inherently unable to discover serious problems with the design, architecture, or the code itself early in the cycle and can really identify them only when it is too late for a correction. Not knowing what problems might exist until the end of the release cycle results in a lower-quality product or longer release cycle. Traditional methods are also prone to creating silos, where product managers throw requirements over the wall to designers, who then throw their design specifications over the wall to development teams, who throw their code over to a quality team, that eventually authorizes the release of a product. Due to the limited interaction and communication among these teams during the production of each deliverable, each team is playing a game of telephone and putting its own interpretation on the requirements or the specifications. As in the telephone game, the end result very rarely matches the original intention.