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. Read More