Not Just Working Software Anymore

The Agile Manifesto leads us to think about the importance of working software. The definitions of "working" vary widely: in xUnit-driven projects, it means that the green bar comes up; in Scrum, it means that you have finished what was on the sprint backlog. The concept of "done-done-done" includes refactoring for the well-being of the programmer. However, in spite of its supposed focus on customer engagement, Agile rarely leads to methods that speak of usability, interaction design, or human comfort.

In this seminar we'll frame Agile development in a way that emphasizes software development as if the end user mattered. We'll focus on making sure that the user vision doesn't become lost in the process. Beyond the storied on-site customer of XP, who looks forward to a promised conversation with a developer around a user story, we'll show you how to engage your testers so that they can test the right things, how to engage user experience staff so your interfaces are appealing to your market and the user, and how your developers can implement the interfaces and the software behind them in a way that builds on sound interaction design principles. We'll show you how to design systems whose objects reflect the end user conceptual model of their business — a long-forgotten foundational principle of object-oriented design.