Managing UCD within agile projects

share some insights from managing user experience (UX) professionals involved in software-development projects that follow an Agile development methodology, and to stimulate thoughts about ways to anticipate and address potential challenges that Agile approaches might pose for a UX director or manager. Over the past decade, traditional, plandriven software development methods have been supplemented with a growing number of newer, more nimble methods, including: Extreme Programming [1], Agile/ Scrum [2, 4, 9], Crystal Methods [4], and Adaptive Software Development [5]. While these methods vary in terms of their specific approaches and unique contributions, they all attempt to cope with accelerated rates of change in highly competitive software markets. These approaches break up large development projects and deliverables over many months into smaller chunks of work over much shorter durations, e.g., often into cycles of twoto five-week “sprints” [9]. Key benefits associated with these approaches are well documented in the literature [1,2] but focus mostly on creating higher-quality code quickly with smaller teams. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on Agile initiatives, but I openly acknowledge that specific details may vary considerably even among these newer approaches. Before addressing Agile challenges, it is necessary to consider what I mean by user-centered design (UCD), even though most readers will be quite familiar with one or more approaches. Most flavors of UCD being practiced tend to regard UCD as both a general philosophy of focusing on people or “users” throughout the product life cycle and a set of methods and tools used to produce products with this focus. SAP has borrowed from the rich tradition of UCD [6, 7, 8] and promotes four fundamental principles: 1. Focus on “real” end users and engage them early and continuously throughout the product life cycle. 2. Validate UI requirements and designs by observing, measuring and recording end users. 3. Design, prototype and develop UIs iteratively. 4. Understand and design for “holistic” user experience.