Jackson Fox — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 20:34:29 GMT

I’m concerned with Dave’s response to staggered UX/dev work. I did some reading on the “Staggered Iterative Waterfall” concept, and there are some good points out there:

* Splitting work across iterations makes it harder to adapt to change requirements * It’s harder to track “doneness” at the story level * Reduces opportunities for collaboration

That said, staggered design/development still seems to be one of the better approaches to allowing time for design efforts. I would love to hear more of Dave’s thoughts on this.

As for measuring UX work, I agree with Cennydd that it’s an important topic. Without a way of assessing doneness at the design level it’s hard to track burndown, and hard to transition from design to development. When we don’t use UX-centric acceptance tests, we tend to leave design evaluation till it’s too late to change things easily.

Lastly, I’ve tried tracking UX work separately from from dev work, including UX estimates on stories. The problem is that it’s damn hard to figure out when a design is done, and even harder to figure that out ahead of time. More often than nought we ended up estimating how long the deliverables would take to produce instead of the real time it would take to figure out the design.

Thinking and Making: Comments by Jackson Fox