Article: Agile Development Processes: An Interview with Jeff Patton
UIEtips 9/12/06: Agile Development Processes: An Interview with Jeff Patton
For the last 20 years, a revolution has been underway in the way organizations have developed software systems. It came about from a realization that existing processes for developing large systems were just not meeting the demands of the workplace. Before the revolution, the resulting systems were late and often didn’t come close to meeting the users’ needs.
The result was a brand new set of practices, often called Agile Development processes. Instead of long development times, software is developed in short time boxes, called iterations, which typically last one to four weeks. Each iteration is handled as its own project, with small, but solid deliverables. The goal is get something in front of users as soon as possible.
Sound familiar? In parallel, there’s been a similar revolution in the field of Experience Design over the same 20 years. We started with doing all of our usability work at the end of a project, but we’ve been pushing to get teams to conduct shorter and shorter iterations, with testing and other research techniques moving as far forward into the development process as possible.
Now it’s time for these two revolutionary approaches to merge. While the basic fundamentals are the same, their independent evolutions have made it a rough match. Care needs to be taken to get them to talk to each other.
Seeing the impending collision of these two revolutions for many of our clients, we reached out to a person who has been at the forefront of this thinking, Jeff Patton. Jeff floats (shall we say agilely?) between these two worlds and is our go-to guy when it comes to how you integrate experience design in to the agile environment.
In today’s UIEtips, Joshua Porter and I had the opportunity to interview Jeff Patton about his views. The interview turned out great and I’m very pleased to share it with you today.
Is your organization involved with a move to Agile processes? How have you worked to integrate your UX practices? We want to hear your thoughts and comments. Add to the conversation in the comments below.