In an inspiring presentation on integrating user experience and agile development Declan Whelan gave he stressed the important rol interaction designers have in this process and he offers a few suggestions for them.

According to him reports show that in the US about one third of software projects are cancelled and one half over budget while only 16% are on time and budget. Many companies respond to this by imposing stronger process control mechanisms with comprehensive documentation contracts and detailed plans.

Declan points out that this often doesn’t work because software is not a repeatable process and it is creativity and teamwork that drive software development. And that sometimes these control mechanisms have even made the situation worse because they struggle to keep pace with technology changes and competitive pressures.

The alternate approach the ‘agile community’ offers is putting together a cross-functional team that work together from requirements through to functioning software in iterations of 1 to 4 weeks.

Declan names some challenges to fitting UX into the agile methods;

Agile teams focus on stakeholders - interaction designers focus on users
Agile teams focus on technical issues - interaction designers focus on usability
Agile teams focus on modeling just-in-time - designers model up-front.

He however sees a tremendous opportunity to close the gap between these perspectives and offers a few suggestions for an interaction designer on an agile team:

“Infuse user experience issues and approaches into the team — train them, let them know your world.
Be the user advocate and lobbyist, especially with the product stakeholder.
Use personas — make them physically visible and make sure they are present as the actor in every agile user story.
Introduce user experience guidelines — good agile teams will follow them if you can show the value.
Do just-enough user experience modeling — look for minor course corrections rather than Eureka moments.
Use light-weight tools — whiteboards, index cards, pen and paper.
Be a generalizing specialist — do whatever you can to help the team follow the agile mantra and “do the simplest thing that could possibly work.”

See summary and slide show on chopsticker.com by Robert Barlow-Busch