Agile and research

[Carol Barnum]

Janus'  question is timely, and Marlene's response about the role of 
UEX (with the need for management support for setting this priority) 
is critical to finding a way to keep research in the priority list 
when the push is on feature development in short spring cycles.

David Dayton and I presented on the challenge of keeping UX a 
priority in a session at last year's STC conference.  At this year's 
UPA conference, we're presenting the results of two surveys conducted 
by us with a client that went from waterfall to agile 
development.  The impact on usability testing was significant.  We 
measure the attitudes of the developers in the two surveys (one in 
waterfall, the other in agile).

In a nutshell, the usability research piece was sacrificed on the 
alter of agility, although the developers mostly felt that this was 
not the case.  In place of usability testing with us (the external 
vendor), they substituted what they called "informal" testing, which 
used customers from down the hall to review the product.  The 
customer representative on the agile team was the product manager (a 
dual role that, in my view, is impossible to maintain).  Because this 
company does not have an internal UX team or even a designated UX 
individual, the research piece derived from usability studies had no advocate.

I wrote an article about this in Cutter IT journal (Oct. 2007), but I 
don't think it's available to non-subscribers.  The best article I 
have read about how to do it right (the folks at AutoDesk) is by 
Desiree Sy, and was published in the Journal of Usability Studies, 
May 2007.  Although Autodesk doesn't work in the gaming industry, she 
describes how they use a variation of the RITE method (Rapid 
Iterative Testing and Evaluation), developed by Microsoft in its 
gaming application group.

HTH,
Carol Barnum


-----------------------
Dr. Carol Barnum
Professor of Information Design
Director of Graduate Studies
www.spsu.edu/idc
Director of the Usability Center
www.usability.spsu.edu
Southern Polytechnic State University
1100 S. Marietta Pkwy
Marietta, GA 30060
email:  cbarnum at spsu.edu
voice mail: 678-915-7201
fax: 678-915-7425
---------------------
author of Usability Testing and Research
Winner of "Distinguished" STC international  publication award
available from Longman or Amazon.com



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