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!
   • Agile in practice: Case study
5. Challenges for UX practitioners
   • Little up-front design time
   • It's hard to talk about users when they are poorly defined
   • Agile is developer-centric
   • There is little time to test
   • Agile is not conducive to a centralized UX team
   • We have to do Agile by the book, and UX isn't in that book.
   • Challenges: Case study
6. Integrating UX into Agile teams
   • User Experience people are bridges
   • UX work is early, flexible
   • Low-fidelity prototypes as specification document
   • User Experience work happens in parallel
   • Guerilla-style UX validation
   • Integrating into teams: Case study
7. Guerilla usability: quick-and-dirty techniques
   • Early work
   • Sprint-specific work
   • Decoupled (holistic) work
   • Post-sprint work
8. Making it happen
   • UX people have to embrace Agile too!
   • Showing user needs to a fast-moving team
   • Showing your value
   • Essential techniques for short-staffed teams
   • Special challenges for large and distributed teams
   • Making it happen: Case Study
   • Always room to grow

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.

Comparing the Editions

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).

Comparison of the editions:

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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