Tony Collen — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:56:06 GMT

I’m currently pushing for a UCD process at work, and we’ve drank the Scrum kool-aid already.

The points I’m having the largest difficulty resolving are mines 2 and 5.

For #2, because we tend to do 2- to 3-week sprints, on the development team we tend to not know what’s coming up until our sprint planning meeting. We tend to do a lot of responding to RFP’s, which is a minefield in itself. Often as developers, we get the standard spreadsheet of requirements directly from the customer, without much analysis into the problem.

Which leads into #5. Once we know what we need to do, the sprint timer has started, and we often don’t discuss designs and possible solutions until we’re in our sprint planning meeting. Our situation is made worse by the fact that the developers on this team are all remote to each other, so our meetings tend to take place over the phone.

I’ve been an advocate for getting more “look-ahead” in our process, and having a specifically defined role within the organization that works with project management and customers to come up with a design before dumping work on engineers.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Tony Collen