Posted by Robert Merrill on August 9, 2010 under Uncategorized | 
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Robert will be speaking on “Room to Breathe: The Vital Role of the BA in Shaping Early Project Effort Expectations” at WI BADD™, the Wisconsin Business Analysis Development Day, on Tuesday 10/5/2010 in Madison, WI.
Posted by Robert Merrill on May 4, 2010 under Agile Methods, Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment
I’m always on the lookout for where I need to be heading with my practice, and the idea of Agile User Experience Development is now on the short list.
I’ve been on teams with some fairly good usability/user experience people over the years, and they love the waterfall. Identify all the users, develop all the personas, and then make a complete set of wireframes and subject them to some level of user testing before doing a whole lot else. The result can be months of calendar time and up to 20% of the project budget gone, and you still don’t have any working code, and therefore the accompanying established team velocity that lets you hold the ever-present launch-date wolves at bay and keep the project from turning into a Death March.
This particular bit of BDUF is deemed necessary because user experiences are holistic, so you have to have a holistic view of the entire system, and not just the narrow functional slices favored by Agile software methods, or the user experience will be choppy. And refactoring the user experience, like agile developers refactor code (rearranging it without changing any of the functionality), is not something you want to do.
The result is a mismatch—a failure of the gears to mesh very well—and even though I’ve been on teams where there was mutual respect between the user-experience folks and the shafts-and-gears software folks, there’s often been an unresolved tension as well. Just when you think the team’s jelled nicely, it flares up again.
But I’ve always wondered, “What if you really could shrink the up-front UEx work significantly, just like I’ve learned to shrink the up-front business analysis, estimation, and planning? Don’t eliminate it; just reduce it to the point of diminishing returns?”
So two articles from my Tweet stream, by Esther Derby and Kent Beck (both are “names”), caught my eye.
In Agile UI Design Esther Derby says, “Establish critical design standards at the beginning and work out the details as the software grows. Look and feel, when to use drop down menus, when to us pop-ups can be decided early. But it’s not necessary (or desirable) to have a wireframe for screens that won’t be worked on for months. Too much can change.”
Esther was inspired in part by Kent Beck’s Capital-Efficient UI Design. “Iteration is the new inspiration,” says Kent. He introduces the reader to two web-based tools, www.fivesecondtest.com, and www.UserTesting.com.
“Neither of these services substitute for building real, person-to-person, in-depth relationships with real customers. And you still have to have the ideas to test in the first place. Rapid iteration with lousy ideas will result in a lousy interface. However, user interface inspiration just got rollerskates.”
And, in a “Scene I’d Like to See,” Kent Beck warns developers, “If you are working with a designer who begins using these services, you are going to have to up your game.”
Posted by Robert Merrill on April 26, 2010 under Software-Intensive Businesses, Waterfall (SDLC) | Be the First to Comment
I’ve long told my customers that big waterfall software specs are more like insurance policies than blueprints, especially when I hear the phrase “sign-off” more than once a week. They are part of Covey the Younger’s Trust Tax.
But in Deniability, Seth Godin puts it better that I ever could. “At some point, that effort [anticipatory CYA] becomes so great you never actually ship anything, which of course is the very best protection against failure.”
Ouch!