Summary

Rapid Application Development (RAD) processes such as Agile, Scrum, and the like, simultaneously 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

> Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox summarizing the report

Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary
   • The promise of Agile methods
   • The threat of Agile methods
   • Making Agile and usability work
2. Introduction
3. Agile — theory and history
   • What is Agile/Rapid Application Development?
   • The main elements of Agile
   • Differences from other development processes
   • Agile benefits for UX practitioners
4. Agile in practice
   • Partial Agile implementations
   • Being the only Agile kid on the block
   • The effects of poor Agile implementations
   • Just do it!
5. Integrating UX into Agile teams
   • Challenges for UX practitioners
   • User Experience people are bridges
   • UX work is early, flexible
   • Low-fidelity prototypes as specification document
   • User Experience work happens in parallel
   • Guerilla usability: quick-and-dirty techniques
6. Making it happen
   • UX people have to embrace Agile too!
   • Know when to do your work
   • Showing user needs to a fast-moving team
   • Showing your value
   • Essential techniques for short-staffed teams
   • Special challenges for large and distributed teams
   • Always room to grow

What You Get

• Information about what actually worked (and didn't work) in 12 companies that moved to Agile and still cared about user experience.
  • Additional experience from the 105 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.

Who Should Read This Report?

• Usability specialists, interaction designers, and other user experience professionals in organizations that have moved (or are thinking of moving) to an Agile development methodology.
• Anybody in charge of an organization's development methodology, if they don't want to see drastically reduced user experience quality after moving to Agile.

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