Experience Driven Agile - Developing Up to an Experience, Not Down to a Feature

Copyright © 2012 Kaleb Walton, Brian Anderson, Michael Hughes and Terri Whitt

Experience Driven Agile:Developing Up to an Experience, Not Down to a Feature

Kaleb Walton & Brian Anderson



We Expect You to Leave With

Knowledge of how to drive agile development with user experience

A glimpse of experience driven agile at scale Two new agile survival tools you soon won't be

able to live without!


Who Are You?

Product Owner Scrum Master Agile Coach

Developer UX Other?



Familiar?


What Caused It?

Loose requirements Lack of context Real stakeholder MIA

Confusion of how stories play together

Tire shortage



The Agile Gap

Agile doesn't directly address

Ineffective prioritization

Unstable development with constant rework, thrashing and delay

Inconsistent, frustrating and low-value product experience

Miscommunication and misunderstanding about your product outside of development

Agile facilitates communication primarily focused on Development of Features

The gap is not in either of those - it’s in the integration of Experience

FeaturesDevelopment

FeaturesDevelopment

Traditional

Experience

Optimal

Experience


How Do You Get Them to Think“It's an Elephant”?



Product Backlogs Fail at UX

Elephant = Intended experience Features of elephant = Epics & user stories in

your product backlog Blind Scientists = Developers, product

managers, delivery leads, sellers, marketing, executives and everyone in between

What do your stakeholders think of your product backlog?


What We've Tried

User Stories and Epics Contrary to INVEST Experience is expressed in multiple stories/epics

Use Cases Lacks context and

motivational trigger Too detailed, task-specific

and time consuming Meetings

Takes time away from development Slow and expensive


What About Story Mapping?

Getting closer, but should this really be an afterthought?


How Do You Incorporate User Experience?



Drive Agile With Experience:Meet Your Two New Survival Tools



The “Pitch”

Quickly conveys background of problem, proposed solution and statement of value

Shirt-size estimates make for easy prioritization (story points are fine too)

Sprinkle in risk and value to make prioritization even easier

Prioritize dozens of experiences, not hundreds

General format:The problem is <problem>. Imagine if <solution>. This solution would result in <value statement>.

Lightweight precursor to...

Effective Prioritization and Assignment of Work Items

The problem is that systems managers spend too much time prioritizing and assigning their team's daily work efforts. Imagine if Systems Manager Plus offered better prioritization capabilities and automated assignment based on definable business rules. This solution would result in reduced cost for systems managers by enabling more efficient work assignment, leading to better response times.


The “Scenario”

Borrowed from UX discipline Paints a clear picture of an entire experience Extremely versatile and ready for use outside

development Our definition:

“A real-world example of a person's experience with a product, describing context with a problem and a proposed solution.”


Telling a Story


Example Scenario

EFFECTIVE PRIORITIZATION AND ASSIGNMENT OF WORK ITEMS

PROBLEM

Mary, a systems manager at ABC Health, is responsible for a team of 12 system administrators who handle steady state support of their health care systems and network. One of her biggest time sinks is prioritizing and assigning her teams daily work efforts. The tool she uses, Systems Manager Plus, doesn't give her any prioritization features except for the ability to sort on a 'priority' field when reviewing work items.

As she spends half of her time prioritizing she ends up working over time to tend to her other duties.

SOLUTION

After a major update Mary signs into Systems Manager Plus, heads to the work items area and is pleasantly surprised to see a number of new prioritization capabilities. There are more fields available to sort and filter, as well as a “smart assignment” system that enables her to specify rules that will result in automatic assignment to specific members of her team.

Mary creates a few rules, applies them to existing work items, and is excited to see that over a quarter of the items were automatically assigned. She proceeds to sort and filter the remaining work items to prioritize and assign to her team. As more work items trickle in she notices that many of them are being auto-assigned.

These improvements have enabled Mary to focus less on prioritizing and more on doing.


Easily Pull Out Stories and Epics

Additional sorting capabilitiesAs a systems manager I want to sort work items by additional fields such as created date, severity and platform so that I can more effectively prioritize them.

Additional filtering capabilitiesAs a systems manager I want to filter work items by additional fields such as created date, severity and platform so that I can more effectively prioritize them.

Smart assignment system (epic)As a systems manager I want to specify assignment rules for the system to use to automatically assign work items so that I don't have to assign every work item manually.

Apply new smart assignment rules to existing work itemsAs a systems manager I want to apply new smart assignment rules to existing work items so that I can use smart assignment on work items created after the smart assignment process has executed.


Scenarios Are Agile

Minimum Viable Product: What is the minimum experience someone would pay for?

Lightweight: Low cost to develop, flexible and quick to communicate.

Better Contract: More reliable as it's written in terms of Experience rather than Features.

Just Barely Good Enough and Just in Time: Fidelity naturally matches immediate need.

Ya Ain’t Gonna Need It: Does it enable the scenario?


Before iteration During iteration After iteration

All of the above Never

When Do You IncorporateUser Experience?



Basic Experience Driven Agile

Product Backlog Iteration Backlog

Scenarios StoriesPitches

Estimate, ValuateAssess, Prioritize

Estimate

Product Owners,UX Analysts, Architects and Stakeholders

Scrum Masters, Developersand Testers

Involvement Over Time by Role

Pro

duct

Mgt

Act

iviti

es


Experience Driven Agile At Scale

Portfolio Backlog

Pitches

Estimate, ValuateAssess, Prioritize

Estimate

Product Owners,UX Analysts, Architects and Stakeholders


Involvement Over Time by Role

Pro

duct

Mgt

Act

iviti

es

Product Backlogs

IterationBacklogs

StoriesScenarios

Scenarios

Prioritize


UX in Experience Driven Agile

Strategy DayPortfolio Product IterationRelease

Product OwnersArchitects and Stakeholders


Pitch consideration, estimation, valuation, risk assessment and prioritization

Scenario collaboration, development, review, estimation, and prioritization

Scenario breakdown, wireframing, story breakdown and clarification

Stakeholder & customer reviews

Collaboration Over Time


Thought provoking More of the same

What Did You Think?

Want to learn more

Indifferent



Questions?



Contact Us

Kaleb [email protected]

http://experiencedrivenagile.com

Brian [email protected]

Thanks to Other Experience Driven Agile Contributors

Michael Hughes, [email protected]

Terri [email protected]

Technology

Experience Driven Agile - Developing Up to an Experience, Not Down to a Feature