Re: Scrum and UCD

linda.hellman wrote:
> I would like hear from You, what kind of actual troubles and problems You have had when using both Scrum and User-Centered Design?
> And what advantages has the use of both methods brought to the project?
>  

Hi, Linda. This may be a slightly more philosophical answer than you
want, but I think one important set of issues can be summed up by
Voltaire's maxim, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

In my youth, I was very excited by the design of the internals of a
system, what is sometimes called a system's architecture. (Although
that's definitely distinct from the sort of design you're thinking of,
bear with me a bit.) Every time some problem came up in a live system,
the answer to me was obvious. I should have spend more time researching,
put more effort into analyzing, drawn just a few more beautiful diagrams.

For every new system, I'd redouble my efforts. But that never worked,
not like I wanted it to. Every time I'd put my theories into practice,
I'd learn something. Every time we'd try to build something, the world
would change on us. Every time we released something perfect, the world
would show us what we'd missed. I resented that terribly.

Agile methods, though, gave me the ability to make that a source of
strength, not a source of weakness. Now I start rough, and let the world
tell me what it needs. That doesn't mean that I don't put plenty of time
and effort into research and planning, as planning is a great way to
think things through. But it does mean I rarely have to bet heavily on
the perfection of my plans. Instead of a thousand bets being resolved on
one roll of the dice, I get to make my bets a few at a time, following
up on the wins and learning from the losses.

In the end, I get better results with less effort and less stress. I'd
never go back. A lot of software architects feel the same way.


This relates to your question because I think the world of user-facing
design is going through a similar transition that the software
architecture world has spent the last decade or so going through.
Designers face a lot of the same issues that software architects did,
with one added burden: they had to depend on those architects, giving
them even less control over both the process and the outcome.

It's my firm belief that things will turn out similarly. People will
create new approaches, new ways of working, and new techniques that make
short cycles and tight feedback loops a source of great power for
continuous improvement. In fact, they are creating and using them right
now. I've visited quite a number of agile shops over the last few years,
and although I've seen my share of disgruntled designers, I've seen many
more who say they are very happy, and even a few who say weekly releases
are great, but they'd love it to be faster.

William