Rapid Application Development (RAD) processes such as Agile and Scrum pose an opportunity and a threat to achieving a quality user experience. It all depends on how it's handled. The standard methodologies as described in books don't work in practice, if you care about the usability of your products. But small modifications work wonders, as we found when studying how Agile works on real projects. 

The report contains detailed analyses of five trends we saw in most successful organizations:

• UX people are bridges: embedded with the team but also involved in high level/early planning
• UX work is early, flexible: done up-front to storyboard level with good expectation setting that changes will happen
• Low-fi prototype is the ongoing spec: owned by UX, agreed by stakeholders
• UX work happens in a parallel track: pair complex back-end sprints with UX intensive work
• Guerilla style UX validation: fast, discount methods run frequently and regularly on early code

The 119-page report is based on case studies from 16 organizations that have embraced Agile while also caring about user experience. Further adding to the empirical evidence in the report are the findings from surveying 174 professionals.

What You Get

• Information about what actually worked (and didn't work) in 16 companies that moved to Agile and still cared about user experience.
  • Additional experience from the 174 professionals we surveyed.
• Many best practices you can follow when adapting Agile as described in books to actual development practices such that you won't suffer a loss of usability.

Download report excerpt (2MB PDF)

What's new in the 2nd Edition?

This 2nd edition contains additional case studies, increasing from 12 to 16. 

If you already own the 1st edition of this report, should you buy the 2nd edition? Probably not, because the main conclusions in the first edition were confirmed in Study Two (though some were refined or extended in the new edition).