A number of User Experience (UX) practitioners are beginning to ask themselves how they can adopt Agile methods to gain the sorts of collaborative outcomes that their developer brethren have been reaping since the signing of the Agile Manfesto 10 years ago in Salt Lake City.
There have been a few practices emerging over the last few years the UX community have been examining this phenomenon. Blog posts from, the highly respected Jeff Patton and Austin Govella reinforce to early adopters that working in parallel is one of many best-practice that is to be encouraged. This seems like fairly good advice given most people’s experience with the design then build paradigm. Here, design creates a shared vision for the project, and the build phase realises it as working code.
Creating a design vision is always important for the success of the project
When leveraging the best-practice Project Management technique of chunking, from the tomes of Prince2 and PMBOK, we have an effective mechanism for managing uncertainty in a project by doing the design and build one bit at a time.
Chunking large projects into small blocks of work is a great practice to follow, as the PMBOK reinforces to its Project Managers
It makes sense great from a designers perspective. Developers need to understand the client’s vision for each piece of product, so they work ahead of the development cycle. Sometimes I’ve heard this called the Time Travel UX + Agile approach (I love that it’s called that!).
Overall, to quote Austin:
“planning, design, modeling will always be necessary prior to development“
[Note: I don't subscribe to this notion - M]
You might have also seen this approach termed ‘Washing Machine’. Its a phrase that reflects that design, again, works ahead of each development cycle to feed it design vision and requirements.
Lynn Miller's first description the pattern of parallel track development
It’s important to note that, at this stage, nothing I’ve written about is classified as an Agile methodology. In fact, this is just dressed-up Waterfall process. What ever Austin or Jeff might say, or how they might describe it, this linear approach that places design before development is just Waterfall.
When design comes before the build, it is still a waterfall process, not an agile one
So, then, how can UX fit into the development cycle? If you’re a designer, UX practitioner, an IA, or identify with any numnber of similar acronymns, I strongly believe that the answer lies in understanding Scrum’s approach to Agile, and not by creating independent methods that continue to reinforce the separation of design + build.
M
[...] in principle, a faily sensible way of working, and it is. But it isn’t Agile. It’s just another way to describe the deterministic approach to software development that is typical of Waterf… projects. The flaw that Lynn and others make in this way of working is that the UX Sprint becomes [...]