Skills for Agile Designers
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Agile designers need to quickly see the essence of a problem and shape reasonable solutions. When things don’t go according to plan, they must react, readjust their thinking, and try again. Seasoned agile designers strike a balance. They know the difference between core and revealing design tasks and plan accordingly. When unanticipated difficulties crop, they adapt their work rhythms. This tutorial introduces techniques and vocabulary for articulating design solutions and simple measures of technical debt and different kinds of development work.
This tutorial combines short presentations introducing new concepts and techniques with short, to-the-point exercises based on a design problem used throughout.
Outline:
Introduction-what makes a designer agile? How can you become more agile?
A designer’s story: a tool for seeing/communicating what’s important (5 minutes)
Exercise: Playing a role, write a story then discuss/debrief (15 minutes)
Identify points of variation using “hot spot” cards. Commonality-variability and flexible solutions: From simple to complex (15 minutes)
Exercise: Identify a hot spot (10 minutes)
Trust Regions: a technique for seeing where “defensive” behavior is needed
Implications of trust
Handling requests from untrusted sources, testing and trust
Exercise: Identify trust regions (5 minutes)
Design problem types: A tool for balancing design priorities (10 minutes)
Core, revealing, and the rest
Wicked problems and how they affect development
Exercise: Sort stories for a sprint into “core” and “the rest” (10 minutes)
Adding design topics to project retrospectives: simple measures of design work and design debt discussion (15 minutes)
- Write and share designer stories to kick off a new project or major release
- Learn a common vocabulary for characterizing various aspects of a design: trust regions, variation points
- Be able to through designs tasks and identify their project impact: core, revealing, the rest, and wicked problems
- Learn simple measures to track design progress and technical debt
