Meshing Gears: Real-world examples of how design and development integrate -- and fail to
, Amanda Willoughby
Agile methods provide new opportunities to create great products through tightly integrated design and development. But too often, that promise is not fulfilled. In this session, you’ll learn why that is and how leading teams make it work.
Through examination of a variety of real-world projects—from scrappy startups to a team at Google—we’ll discuss patterns for successful user-focused development, and the anti-patterns that can hobble even strong teams. Whether you’re a designer, developer, or product manager, you’ll leave this session with ways to better integrate design and development on your own projects.
Presentation Outline
- Introduction (10 m) - Why good design matters to developers, why developer involvement matters to designers, and why a well-integrated team matters to all project stakeholders.
- Six Example Teams (60 m) - Six real-world examples of teams, including photographs of working spaces, selected process artifacts, and snapshots showing the evolution of products over time. Each will include lessons learned. Questions from the audience are welcome.
- Review, Rate, and Rank (20 m) - After a quick review of discovered patterns and anti-patterns, attendees will jointly rate their impact and choose the ones that will have the utility on their current projects. Handouts with take-home material will be provided.
Example Pattern: Sitting Together
Sitting together is a practice Extreme Programming recommends for developers. But one great way to encourage deeper communication and tighter integration is to add designers to the mix. For example, consider this team:
http://www.scissor.com/resources/teamroom/main_room.jpg
On this team, the four developers sat at the two pairing stations at the right of the photo (#7). Just out of frame to the left, the UI designer sat facing the team (#1). The large whiteboards (#2, #5) frequently contained UI sketches as shared reference material for current work, and longer-term design visions were taped to the walls. Easy communication makes for frequent communication; both designers and developers expressed high levels of satisfaction with the working relationship and the quality of the end product.
Pattern Pros
- easy communication enables use of low-cost artifacts
- spending time together builds team relationships
- short feedback loops enable rapid convergence on strong designs
- designers can do still other work when needed
- developers can learn basic usability through osmosis
- frequent validation of work underway reduces cost of rework
- results of guerrilla user testing can be quickly applied
Pattern Cons
- sometimes designers are spread too thin to spend substantial time with developers
- learning to work side by side can be stressful for all concerned
- some organizations resist building truly cross-functional teams
- when existing relationships are rocky, sometimes people will sit together and still not engage sufficiently
Session Notes
Actual number of teams will vary depending on what additional material we discover between now and then, but we’re shooting for six. Presentation material and a summary of attendee responses will be made available on-line after the conference. We will also try to persuade members of example teams to attend the conference.