Experiences integrating sophisticated user experience design practices into agile processes

Most significant software processes involve a wide range of disciplines, from programming to testing, and from documentation to database development. Unfortunately, agile processes are typically presented from the point of view of programmers, with the other disciplines often left feeling excluded and disenfranchised. One such discipline is that of user experience design (often abbreviated UED), a discipline encompassing several key specialties including user research, interface design, visual design and usability testing. UED activities span the full lifecycle of product development from early requirements analysis to construction and testing, spanning both large scale system issues and detailed components, with its work products forming key inputs and deliverables of many development activities. In this experience report, we discuss the author's coaching experiences integrating sophisticated UED practices into the agile process initiatives of several organizations. His background is initially that of a programmer and later that of an agile process coach, and we'll explore his journey understanding UED practices and how they map to popular agile processes, mainly Scrum in "agile software development with Scrum" by K. Schwaber and M. Beedle (2002) and extreme programming in "extreme programming explained: embrace change" by K. Beck (2000). We'll chronicle the teams' struggles to come to grips with the often programming centric orientation of agile processes, and their ongoing efforts to integrate their UED best practices into the incremental, collaborative world of agile processes.