Depending on how they’re handled, Rapid Application Development (RAD) processes such as Agile and Scrum can enhance or threaten user experience quality.
There are good reasons to believe that usability and Agile development methods can work together and improve user experience quality:
Agile offers many opportunities for overcoming problems with traditional development methods that have long impeded usability.
Approaching Agile narrowly, as a programming methodology rather than a system development methodology, threatens to destroy the last decade’s progress in integrating usability and development. But, as outlined above, there are ways around each of these threats. So long as teams recognize the threats as explicit issues, they need not harm product quality.
Finally, we know from our research that many companies have made things work swimmingly — once they adapted the Agile methodology to suit quality-focused system development.
For user experience practitioners who support Agile teams, the main change is in mindset. Having good, general user experience knowledge will help you understand how to change traditional design and evaluation methods to meet your Agile team’s different focus. Ultimately, however, you must both believe in yourself and embrace Agile development concepts if you want to succeed.
If you’re prepared to change your practices and take on the responsibility, there are great opportunities to improve your effectiveness and your impact on the teams you support.
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