On January 30th, 2010 at the Cooper offices in San Francisco, CA, practitioners of agile software development and user experience design met to see if common ground could be found.
Alan Cooper and Ward Cunningham
As agile adoption has increased throughout the world, thought leaders from the agile and user experience communities have been talking past each other. All along they were both talking about same thing: better software.
The agile mindset seeks to create sustainable software. Agile wants to be iterative and embrace change: design just enough to bring value to the customer. User experience design on the other hand has carried a stigma of representing a big design up-front mentality.
The word customer was traditionally at the center of this misunderstanding. Agile values customer involvement in the software development process: a great approach when the goal is to create minimally marketable software. Close communication with the person paying you to produce software is a great way to ensure you do not over-produce.
The user experience mindset seeks to create humane software that improves people’s lives. In the user experience world the customer is the user. By taking care of your customer’s users, the customer is happy. A happy customer is a customer with happy customers.
Compare these values—sustainable and humane—and see that a culture for better software can be realized.
The goal of the software makers at the agile-ux retreat was to find a common ground and nurture a unified culture: Some people confessed to being less than optimistic. What resulted was larger than agile and user experience. What emerged was a new normal and a higher benchmark for collaboration.
Through over 20 hours of discussions, panels, and exercises the group of approximately 30 software makers made a sinusoidal, divergent-convergent discussion pattern. Words like trust, solidarity, interdisciplinary, and fractal were shouted or uttered. Concepts such as us vs. them thinking, and overcoming the momentum of tradition were argued or pondered.
The values thus far are as follows…
Disciplines over roles
Roles split teams into silos that split goals into task segregation, encouraging specialist behaviors and us vs. them culture.
Effectiveness over efficiency
By teaching and learning effective software practices, efficiency naturally follows.
Product over process
By emphasizing process, the goal to produce and deliver product is overlooked.
Shared responsibility over sole responsibility
When there is something worth doing, it must be done. Ask for help when the task is unfamiliar or unwieldy.
Attendees are still trying to come to terms with what the progress they made means for the whole community.