The Agile Gap: Closing it with User Experience

The Agile Gap:
Closing it with User Experience
Brian M. Anderson & Kaleb D. Walton

© 2012 IBM Corporation

When have you experienced this in an Agile environment?


Why did this happen to you?


“We are always trying to push ourselves
upstream. The thing about Agile is there is
no upstream.”
- Hugh Beyer, Author of User Centered Agile Methods


The Agile Gap – Understanding the user experience

 Do you see any of this?
– Ineffective prioritization
– Unstable development with constant rework,
Requirements
thrashing and delay
– Inconsistent, frustrating and low-value
product experience
Development
User – Miscommunication about your product from
Experience outside of development
 Agile facilitates communication primarily
focused on Requirements + Development
 The gap is not in the requirements or
development - it’s in the understanding of
the user experience


Can you close the gap with existing agile tools?

User Stories

 Adding context is contrary to INVEST
– Story Independence deters expression of total UX
– Context is big, not Small, reducing story agility
– Heavy context may imply undue Value
 User stories aren't broken – don't fix them!


User Stories

Epics

 Just a large user story
 Adding context brings same problems as with user stories
 Total user experience is often comprised of multiple epics
 Epics aren't broken – don't fix them!


User Stories

Epics

Product Vision

 “Paints a picture of the future that draws people in” - Scrum Alliance
 Helps to point people in the same direction
 Never intended to describe user experience
 Wrong tool for the job

Other ways to define the user experience?

Use cases
– Lack valuable user context (motivator trigger)
– Too detailed and task specific (action-oriented)
– Takes too much time

More meetings!
– Takes time away from development
– Different meetings for different groups
– Slow, expensive method to close the gap


How do you close
the gap?


Introducing the “Scenario”

 Borrowing a concept from the UX discipline
 Our definition:

A real-world example of a person's
experience with a product, describing
context with a problem and a proposed
solution, bringing focus to their goals.

 Paints a picture of an experience
that has value and can be sold


The “elevator pitch”
Example Scenario
EFFECTIVE PRIORITIZATION AND ASSIGNMENT OF WORK ITEMS

PROBLEM
Mary, a systems manager at ABC Health, is responsible for a team of 12 system
administrators who handle steady state support of their health care systems and network.
One of her biggest time sinks is prioritizing and assigning her teams daily work efforts. The
tool she uses, Systems Manager Plus, doesn't give her any prioritization features except for
the ability to sort on a 'priority' field when reviewing work items.
As she spends half of her time prioritizing she ends up working over time to tend to her other
duties.

SOLUTION
After a major update Mary signs into Systems Manager Plus, heads to the work items area
and is pleasantly surprised to see a number of new prioritization capabilities. There are more
fields available to sort and filter, as well as a “smart assignment” system that enables her to
specify rules that will result in automatic assignment to specific members of her team.
Mary creates a few rules, applies them to existing work items, and is excited to see that over
a quarter of the items were automatically assigned. She proceeds to sort and filter the
remaining work items to prioritize and assign to her team. As more work items trickle in she
notices that many of them are being auto-assigned.
These improvements have enabled Mary to focus less on prioritizing and more on doing.


Derived Stories and Epics

 Additional sorting capabilities
As a systems manager I want to sort work items by
additional fields such as created date, severity and
platform so that I can more effectively prioritize them.

 Additional filtering capabilities
As a systems manager I want to filter work items by
additional fields such as created date, severity and
platform so that I can more effectively prioritize them.

 Smart assignment system (epic)
As a systems manager I want to specify assignment rules for the system to use to
automatically assign work items so that I don't have to assign every work item manually.

 Apply new smart assignment rules to existing work items
As a systems manager I want to apply new smart assignment rules to existing work
items so that I can use smart assignment on work items created after the smart
assignment process has executed.


How Do Scenarios Fit in Agile?


Scenarios are Agile
 Just Barely Good Enough and Just in Time:
– Fidelity naturally matches immediate need.
 Ya Ain’t Gonna Need It:
– Does it enable the scenario?
 Minimum Viable Product:
– What is the minimum experience someone
would pay for?
 Lightweight Contract:
– Low cost, flexible and easy to change.


Yearly Planning Release Planning Sprint Planning Development & Testing Release Review

 Starts with ‘investment themes’
 Continues with market research and other product
management activities (e.g. writing PRD)
 As ideas begin to form, conceptual, or “elevator pitch”
scenarios are developed
 Relative estimates are assigned to each scenario and
they are prioritized in a backlog
 Replaces PRD



 Scenarios broken down & split so they fit into a release
 Assigned to upcoming releases based on priority and
development throughput
 Continued refinement until they are “just barely good
enough” to be broken down into stories
 Wireframes are often developed during this time period
 Scenarios become the lightweight contract between
development and product management



 Development team reviews scenarios and considered the
‘source of truth’ around the user experience
 Common questions about stories are usually answered
within the scenario, without product owner hand-holding
 Scenarios continue to be refined based upon developer
feedback



 Scenarios are constantly referenced by development teams to
validate the user experience they are creating
 Scenarios are often used as the basis for test cases, and for
validating the intended experience
 Serves as the storyboards for iteration reviews
 Progress reporting is scenario-based



 Scenarios are used as the storyboards for the review


How do I get started with scenarios?

Begin Today!

 Start small: Create scenarios for existing stories & epics
– Pick a story from backlog and talk through an example of how it would be used
– Add as much context as possible
– Think of other stories you could naturally pull into scenario

 Continue the evolution: Build your backlog by leading with scenarios
 Maintain the format: 2-act play of Problem + Solution
 Reinforce through communication: Refer to scenarios instead of
stories & epics


Questions?

Brian M. Anderson
brian.m.anderson@us.ibm.com

Kaleb D. Walton
kdwalton@us.ibm.com


References
 http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2012/03/16/hugh-beyer-ux-inside-agile/
– Hugh Beyer quote

 An Easier Way to Develop Product Requirements
– http://www.thesource.pdma.org/easier-way-develop-product-requirements

 Modernizing “Modern” Applications: Agile and a Strategy of Continual,
Iterative Development
– http://www.cutter.com/project/fulltext/updates/2011/apmu1108.html


Fidelity


UX Evolution


The Agile Gap: Closing it with User Experience

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