Tricklin

When I first found out that our company was going to switch over to the SCRUM agile development methodology, I was extremely skeptical. After being with the company for 5 years as a web designer, I had already been a part of two major application overhauls. Both of which took months and months to design. Now, we were planning on implementing a methodology that crammed a set of tasks to be done by a team of designers, developers, QA engineers, and analysts into 30 days worth of work. Since day one, I wasn't sure how we'd be able to incorporate design and usability into this type of process. There were a number of questions I had:

• How many days out of the 30 can be dedicated to design and usability testing?
• How can you possibly design a usable interface in such a short time frame?
• How can you execute usability tests in such a short time frame?
• How can you make modifications based on the UAT results in such a short time frame?

As you can see, a pattern was developing here: "How can (fill in the blank) be accomplished in such a short timeframe?" When I approached anyone with these questions, the responses were not good. The reason: usability design wasn't necessarily thought about when this methodology was created.

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