There’s been a lot of talk recently about Agile development and how usability and user-centered design can play nice together.
Not sure what Agile development is? Think of Agile development as building all pieces of an application at the same time. In manufacturing, this type of development has been conducted since the time that Ford created the assembly line.
You may think Ford’s process was linear, after all, there’s no car at the beginning of the line, and at the end of the line, boom, a car is born. The reality however is that only the assembly of the car happens in a linear fashion on that line. The actual manufacturing of the car parts themselves is all done by various companies in various locations, and then delivered when needed to create the vehicle.
In software development, Agile development means one set of developers may be working on code for say a customer service module, while a different set of interaction designers may be working on the interface for a search tool. Development is done in a non-linear fashion, and only at the end of the process are all the parts connected, and a new application born for the world to see.
Usability testing and user-centered design traditionally have required a more linear process. A design is considered, usability testing is done on the design, and modifications are made before the design is moved into coding, etc. Today however, there are more and more usability teams that have made the leap to Agile design.
There’s an excellent two part article at UIE’s blog on how (and when) to incorporate usability and user-centered design with an Agile development process. I’ve conducted usability testing in an Agile process several times, and struggled a little each time. I did get through it, and learn to both speed things up and cut things down to the basics, but learning by doing is not exactly the best way to go. I wish I had this excellent two part article available, hopefully you’ll find it very insightful too.
You can catch Part 1 of the 12 Best Practices for UX in an Agile Development, or read the original 12 Best Practices Blog created by Jeff Patton of AgileProductDesign.com.
Have you conducted usability in an Agile environment? If yes, how’d it go? If not, do you feel you know what to do or where to start?
