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Is Agile an anti-design pattern?
How Agile leaves design out, and what we can do about it.
You might not guess it from the title of this article, but I love Agile. I work in UX, I lead web projects, and I never want to go back to the time before Agile.
Why the headline, then? Because, in addition to being wonderful for software and web development, Agile as commonly practiced leaves design and discovery out in the cold.
In Agile, discovery is assumed. At a minimum, you need a rough spec and some goals to get started. But is the spec validated against business goals or user needs? Is this the best solution? If so, when does that discovery work happen? Not during Agile development.
Filling the void
There are a few patterns that have emerged to fill this void:
Design Sprints are a compressed two-week (or so) period where all of the complex work of discovery is intended to take place, with an artifact handoff at the end. While I love the ambition, it is essentially a modified waterfall process, just shorter.
Sprint 0 is similar to a design sprint, but more overtly “agile-ish”. A single sprint is set aside to figure out what the heck you are doing! But a single sprint is not nearly enough time, and it does not involve the whole team (I’ve written a bit more about this here).
XP offers a pattern that improves on the design sprint and sprint 0 by integrating design into iterative cycles. Designers are integrated into the team, working on small deliverables as they are being built. What is still missing is integrated discovery and validation. In particular, there is no space for UX research because the focus is on incremental deliverables.
A pattern I really appreciate is Dual Track Agile, where design and development interact in a sprint-paced pax-de-deux, with design and discovery leading one sprint ahead. I feel this pattern is close, but the thing Dual Track lacks is a shared language, wasting time on the throwaway artifacts that designers usually rely on to communicate with development. They are not quite one team, just two teams working together well.
