One of the sessions I was really looking forward during SXSW was Dork Intervention: Bringing Design to Agile. In the past year Info Directions has adopted an agile development model for some of our new software features. The advantages to our development and testing processes are obvious. But as the product owner/designer, it has been a challenge figuring out how to communicate my design/system requirements to the other members of the team. I am accustomed to developing in a waterfall environment, where we spend as much time as needed hammering out the design and requirements before a developer or tester ever begins work. Now, we are expected to design concurrently with dev and test activities. So this session with Karl Nieberding and Kris Corzine of eBay, looked like it had massive potential.
Agile is Broken
The presenters discussed a case study from their experience at eBay. Specifically, how could they reduce the time necessary to post a listing on the auction site from an average of 45 minutes, to 3 minutes or less? The presentation was less about the solution (using bar code scanning software to rapidly input items with a web cam) than the process that got them to the solution. The presenters went through the pros and cons of the various models of incorporating design into agile: Waterfall, mini waterfall, just in time and exclusive design sprints. Ultimately, the presenters decided on a new approach they called Fused Innovation. Unfortunately, their explanation of Fused Innovation was pretty vague. I got the impression that they continued to mash up the first four methods until they found a hybrid that was comfortable and then ran with it. But it was tough to discern exactly how Fused Innovation could be duplicated. They wrapped up with a list of 7 rules of engagement. But these rules were par for the agile course. Nothing earth shattering.
Overall, I was really hoping for a great takeaway to bring back to IDI. So the Dork Intervention was a mild disappointment.
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