Incorporating UCD & Agile software development
Scott Rismiller Monsanto
Christine Jenkins
Kathy Marshall
Jim Marsh
Kathy: history of agile – basic info
Ms. No name: ux design up front then iterative design during development
UX Long Sprint: up front contextual inquiry, focus groups, personas, etc
Jim: best practices. Having the UX process done up front allows developers to hit the ground running. Focus on the areas that you don’t do well so they don’t block you. Use the right amount of documentation. Product owner is critical.
Q&A
UX is important throughout the entire lifecycle to validate the requestors requirements.
Customers like seeing low-fidelity prototypes.
What if there are no or weak product owners?
Scott: if you see a risk to your project, the company is at risk. Make management aware of the risk.
Jim: as a team, they rejected the product owner and replaced her with someone else.
Kathy: current client delayed their project until a strong product owner became available
Christine: reduced a room of 12 decision makers to one product owner who could make decisions
Are the designers and UX people dedicated resources?
Kathy: It depends on how much work is required in the user experience side. Full time is ideal. This assumes you are working on one scrum team. Multiple scrum teams means more design resources.
Where does non-value add refactoring playing into short iterative cycles?
Jim: the technical leaders have to watch it. Sometimes you have to take a full sprint off to pay technical debt. Decided by senior leaders. If too much builds up too often, there is a problem. The sooner you pay off technical debt, the cheaper it will be to pay.
What’s the smallest manageable agile team size?
Jim: 3 product owner and two folks. Two people are agile by default. Kathy: Think about it as number of roles more than the number of bodies.
How much prototyping is done during sprints? How much ahead of time?
Christine: navigation, main page, high risk use cases – before hand. During sprint, prototyping the whole time. Many times the designs two sprints ahead.
Jim: spike – drive a spike to start generating the other requirements – in the middle of a sprint
How can I help my company adopt agile?
Scott: educating the decision makers. Back it up with case studies and the financial aspect. Show the financial value. Propose a case study on a non-essential product
Kathy: have them think of the way a project runs right before a release and imagine running the whole project like that
Jim: most people have heard of it so don’t be left out!
Christine: waterfall plus agile to meet govt regulations. Don’t use the term agile, call it “iterative”
Kathy: be adaptable to the current culture
What kind of things have to work well in a low-fidelity prototype?
It depends on what your trying to show. Whatever you are seeking feedback on needs to work well enough to get feedback.
How is ux testing done when ux resources are low?
Christine: Testing has to happen according to available resources – at least at first. Then build in ux lab testing to your schedule.