UX and Development cannot exist in the same Agile workstream

“UX and Development cannot exist in the same Agile workstream” might sound like an outlandish claim but if you fully understand both it’s obvious.

Can UX be Agile yes, of course in so far that all the effort and artefacts required to deliver UX can exist in an Agile workstream. UX includes user research, user requirement, KPI’s, system wide taskflows, concepts, concept testing, persona definition, user roles, user journeys, usability and accessibility standards, sitemaps, key pathway wireframes.

Development can also be Agile, but not all of it, infrastructure and front end need to be in separate workstreams.

The simple way to express this is to talk through backlog items in a greenfield system;

The user can login…..

• UX will take days
• Front end will take weeks
• Back end will take months

The problem is not size it’s Trajectory and Dependencies;

• UX = T small, understood activity : D access to target audience to validate success and failure paths
• Fe = T mid, may need investigation : D access to dummy credentials store
• Be = T long, will require architecture to respond to scalability and bandwidth changes : D modelling data, server set up, pen testing

Once there is a fuller understanding of these very different aspects of defining, designing, building and deploying it’s become clear that these areas have common points but cannot be run together as and Agile project and to tell client’s that they are is not true.

Agilists don’t call this blind behaviour Agile, we call it Fragile as we know it will shatter at the first problem.