Agile Development and Usability
- Chicago: Thursday, April 22
Melissa Federoff
Full-Day Tutorial
Agile development processes such as the popular Scrum methodology pose significant challenges for user experience professionals. Because of Agile’s condensed timelines and incremental releases, good design can be difficult to achieve. Many UX professionals struggle to overcome these obstacles.
In this seminar, you will learn what Agile is and why so many development companies use it. You will also learn how to adapt your old usability processes so that you can work successfully within this framework alongside of your product teams.
Session examples are drawn from the war stories of many UX professionals who have successfully introduced
user-centered techniques into the Agile process.
What You’ll Learn
- Agile terminology and what it means for usability practitioners
- How to integrate your existing usability processes into Agile development
- New usability approaches to help you maximize your contribution within Agile
- Design communication strategies that work in a fast-moving environment
- Political strategies to get UX involvement welcomed into Agile processes
- How to measure and demonstrate your impact on projects built using Agile
Course Outline
- What is Agile/Rapid Application Development?
- The key differences between Agile and traditional development methodologies
- Development practices and benefits of Agile processes
- How to map usability to Agile concepts
- Challenges for usability practitioners in an Agile environment
- Working at the speed of the project team
- Gathering user data in the face of ambiguity
- Designing without specification documents
- Maintaining the big picture across releases
- Keeping the team focused on user needs
- Techniques for staying ahead of the team
- Owning the user experience through early and frequent involvement
- Creating a parallel design track to stay one step ahead of development
- Introducing user-centered development into the process
- Using prototypes in lieu of documentation
- Building a base of participants to tap into at a moment's notice
- Creating a repository of user information to draw from in scrum meetings
- Conducting guerrilla style usability (e.g., RITE usability, revolving door studies, expert reviews)
- Moving to Agile
successfully
- Ensuring usability survives the move from traditional to Agile development
- Being a shared resource in an Agile environment
- Working across time zones with team members who are not co-located
- Political tips
- Using Agile concepts to your advantage
- Acting as a full member of the team
- Owning usability bugs
- Helping with product backlog prioritization
- Measuring your impact in financial terms
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, exercises, and discussion.
Handouts
Copies of all presentation slides
Who Should Attend
Whether you are already working in an Agile environment, will be soon, or just want to learn more about how usability fits into this type of development methodology, this class will give you both the conceptual overview and the practical steps for integrating usability techniques into an Agile-style development methodology.
Instructor
Melissa Federoff is a Senior User Experience Specialist at Rightpoint Consulting in Chicago. She helps customers to achieve intuitive design through user-centered design and research approaches. Melissa previously worked at salesforce.com in San Francisco where she pioneered new user experience approaches to succeed within the agile development framework. Prior to that she worked as a researcher in the innovative Games User Research group at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. Melissa has over 8 years of experience in the usability field and a Masters of Science degree from Indiana University Bloomington in Game Design and Human Computer Interaction.
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