Agile Ways of Work
Last updated
Last updated
Agile is a philosophy. It is a way that you carry yourself. It is not a bunch of meetings. It is not a bunch of processes or tools. It's not JIRA.
Agile is a mindset that you put into your head, that you approach a different way to deliver value to users and to customers.
And every time you implement Agile, it changes the way it carries out, changes, evolves. It is different every single time. Every team you join that's Agile has a different way of doing things. That's on purpose because of what we follow called the Agile Manifesto.
These are the things that we live by as Agile UX practitioners.
Through this work, we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. What does that mean? It means that you should never come up with a perfect process. You should talk it out with your team and figure out how you should go with your team.
Delivering working software over comprehensive documentation. What does that mean? It means that you should deliver things into the hands of users early and often. And you should spend your energy doing that. Getting it shipped. Getting the research results done. Getting the design done. Getting the evaluation of it. Versus documenting how it works.
Collaborating with customers over making contracts. What does that mean? You shouldn't make a product requirements document. You should not be agreeing to everything all at once and then delivering what you agree to. You should set high level goals and high level priorities and then interact with individuals to figure out how that should change over time. Everything is in a state of flux on your team because everything in the world is in a state of flux. So you should never be building something that is steadfast. and already agreed to. You should be figuring out what you think you're moving toward and then figuring out how can you validate that quickly and early and often to then figure out what your direction needs to be.
Responding to change over following a plan. When the world changes, when your plan has to change, you change the plan. When you're no longer doing research, You got to respond to the change when your research priority changes, you got to respond to the change. When you are in need of making a whole new set of deliverables, you got to respond to the change.
Notice how these are not very concrete. These are not very succinct. They're not telling you exactly how to do it exactly what meetings to do exactly what ways you need to work with researchers and developers and project managers. Because this is a philosophy. This is a way of life. You will live these four tenets
Everything you do is going to be interacting with individuals, delivering working UX results, collaborating with customers, and responding to change.
That's all that Agile is. All the things that you add to Agile, like sprints, and scrum, and retros, and all that stuff, those are the ways of carrying out Agile. These are methodologies of Agile. Agile itself is a mindset. It's a way of life.