George Dinwiddie’s blog

I see many discussions get heated or go in circles when the topic is “design.” In the field of software development, what is design? (Continued)

I recently wrote about Agile Usability.  Now I find an article on StickyMinds, “Getting Agile With User-Centered Design,” by Jon Dickinson and Darius Kumana.  They talk about a number of issues that can come up.  My favorite bit is this:

We must actively challenge the mindset of divided responsibility–” You spec and design it; we’ll build what you spec.” Everyone should work toward the shared vision of a successful experience.

That says so elegantly what I tried to say in my article.

If I had time, I would re-read Tom DeMarco’s book Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, because I have precious little slack in my own life, these days.  So it is that I just now got around to reading Jakob Nielsen’s article, Agile Development Projects and Usability, which William Pietri noted on the Agile Usability list on November 17.

The statement

“For a project to take interaction design and usability seriously, it must assign them ‘story points’ (i.e., resources) on an equal footing with the coding”

jumped out at me.  Alistair Cockburn wrote a thoughtful reply where he noted the same statement.  I agree with Alistair’s comments, but I’d like to comment on this statement from a slightly different perspective. (Continued)

I applied for a new credit card. I wasn’t in the market for a new credit card. I shred credit card offers almost daily. No one sent me an offer that I found too irresistible. No, the funny thing is that my current credit card bank spent money and went to a lot of trouble to convince me to open an account somewhere else.

It sounds very odd, doesn’t it?

Now I happen to know that this particular bank has worked to embrace Agile software development. I know people who have worked with them to do so. And I’m sure that, considering the size of the organization, they’ve made great strides in improving their software development practice. Yet the events that transpired today tell me that they’re missing an important feedback loop–arguably THE important feedback loop–the one that involves the customer.

Here’s what happened: (Continued)