How Design Thinking and Agile Can Be Friends
Agile methodologies do not traditionally allot space, time, or processes for user experience design. Some teams try to accommodate design via separate design sprints that are somewhat coupled to the team's backlog, but these are typically performed two or three sprints ahead. Increasingly, designers are demanding that teams do big, upfront design phases outside of a team's backlog, followed by agile development sprints to implement the design. As markets mature and competition increases, more and more companies must become design-focused or even design-led. Ian and Mary will show you why pure agile practices require design to be performed within a sprint while the product backlog item is in development. Having a validated long-term product vision from the lean methodology may be the key to harmonizing the needs, processes, and roles of user experience design with the desire of agile teams to be self-sufficient. Learn how to incorporate design thinking into your agile methods, without disconnected, upfront, waterfall prerequisites.
Chief storyteller of the book The Three Pillars of Agile Testing and Quality, Mary Thorn is owner of Mary Thorn Consulting in Raleigh, NC. During her more than twenty years of experience with healthcare, financial, and HR SaaS-based products, Mary has held director, manager- and contributor-level positions in software development organizations. A seasoned leader and coach in agile and testing methodologies, Mary has direct experience building and leading teams through large scale agile transformations. Mary’s special expertise is a combination of testing, DevOps, and agile scaling skills that her clients find incredibly valuable. She is also a frequent speaker, teacher and author. You can connect with Mary via LinkedIn.
Ian has more than twenty years of experience designing products for demanding brands in entertainment, publishing, and fintech, including HBO, Disney, EA, Playstation, Activision, UBM, and Ipreo.