Coming from a business management background and only six months professional experience working as a designer, I had not come across the practical application of the Agile approach to development before commencing this UX/UI master's degree. However, it is clear that the nature of Agile work gives employees far higher levels of satisfaction and self-motivation compared to more traditional approaches and enables teams to have input in the estimation and planning processes (Cooke, 2010).
Waldock (2015) explains how Agile practice is an approach where small incremental improvements are made in order to build flexible solutions that continue to be managed and are resource and time-committed depending on the value that they deliver. Hence, the more valuable a solution is at a given time, the more time and resources are assigned to that solution in order to grow that solution's success and vice versa.
With the benefits of Agile being so evident in a project management context, I am excited to begin applying it in my future work and particularly in my UX design group projects next semester. Vidgen and Wang (2009) argue that Agile teams stand out in their ability to work sustainably and rhythmically, work together with customers to co-evolve value, be collectively mindful, adapt and improve the development process, create team learning and create product innovations. I hope by working in a team in this way I will progress from having a mainly theoretical understanding of the advantages of Agile methods and practices to having a more practical and hands-on grasp of it.
This week we were introduced to the topic of Scrum estimation. According to Woodward et al (2010), in Scrum the team members who are responsible for delivering the work should be the ones to estimate it. Opelt (2013) states that a team's performance is measured according to its velocity, which means the amount of functionality that they can provide in a sprint, so the higher a team's output during a sprint the higher their performance. Consequently, if I, as a designer, am aware of my own velocity, it becomes much easier for me to accurately calculate by when I can have a particular product part finished. Personally I feel that after completing the two rapid ideation sessions this semester I am far more aware of how much I can get done in a sprint. I would like to keep doing sprints in order to improve the accuracy of my estimations.
Cooke, J. L. (2010). WHY IS AGILE SO EFFECTIVE? In Agile Principles Unleashed: Proven approaches for achieving real productivity gains in any organisation (pp. 133–142). IT Governance Publishing.
Opelt, A. (2013). Agile contracts creating and managing successful projects with Scrum. Wiley.
Rocha, H. (2019). Wall full of sticky notes [Photography]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/qFpnvZ_j9HU
Waldock, B. (2015) Being Agile in Business: Discover faster, smarter, leaner ways to work. FT Press.
Woodward, E., Surdek, S. and Ganis, M. (2010). A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum. Upper Saddle River, NJ [u.a.]: IBM Press.
Vidgen, R., & Wang, X. (2009). Coevolving Systems and the Organization of Agile Software Development. Information Systems Research, 20(3), 355–376.
