Agile and UCD

There has been plenty of talk about Agile and UCD on the internet and at work. Notably, from the UX camp- UX matters and Nielson. However I came across Agile (via “agile development with rails“) before I did UCD. This is my two cents on the matter.

The popularity of MVC rapid developing frameworks such as RubyOnRails, Cake, Django and Google’s app engine has contributed to the increase in developers using agile.

Using a rapid development framework means that the coding phase of development isn’t a huge singular monolithic piece of work, it can be broken down into smaller sections.

In traditional development you can’t test the front end until you’ve built that back end that drives it, with Scaffolding that comes with RDFs you can.

Conventions and pre-written code that comes with RDFs make it possible for developers to be less protective of the work they have done. After a section is built you can test it… “oh, ok users don’t get that bit, no problem I’ll just re-write it.” Because re-writing a small amount of code that you wrote yesterday is less effort than trying to find the code that you wrote 3 weeks ago.

Testing can be done during the coding phase, giving UX people more opportunities to influence the end result.

I believe that the right answer for Agile+UCD is: A body of work up front defining a blueprint of what the result should look like and then iterative development and testing along the way to ensure it is has a good UX.

An interesting development from the RDF thing is that it is now more possible for a single person to have the time during university to learn both how to write an app and how to ensure it works for users. What will this mean for design firms, will we continue to see development and UX as separate departments? It’s certainly good thing for little niche app markets along the long tail.