Agile culture artifacts
Agile practices have an ambiguous attitude toward specialisation, and at face value some of the seminal work in the field seems to eschew specialists. It might be said that Agilists are sometimes guilty of using the process as a tool to seize initiative in counter-productive patterns.
Given that user experience designers are often specialists that appear at a given point in a product or organisation’s maturity, there are cultural and interpersonal patterns that can work for or against us as we integrate into teams.
At Atlassian the feature set was the focus rather than the user experience. The culture is a classic developer-driven agile culture, with a focus on self-direction. The process of inserting UX practices and specialisation into this culture has taken place over the last 3 years and has involved actions and activities at the product, process, culture, and customer levels. At every point we’ve taken the more inclusive approach.
There are two product releases in particular that present an excellent window into how these layers interrelate: JIRA 4.2 and FishEye 3.5. Through the drama of the JIRA and FishEye releases, this presentation will walk through the social & cultural difficulties and the tools we used to overcome them.
Some of the counter-productive patterns we had to work with included:
- founderitis
- mistrust of design
- preoccupation with existing customers
- featuritis
- design bottleneck
- Some of the Agile UX patterns we used were:
- paper protoyping
- remote testing & validation in the sprints
- interactive mockups
- story mapping
- design wall
- ux workshops