[IxDA Discuss] IxD in agile environments

[Allison Beckwith]

On Feb 14, 2007, at 8:32 AM, Josh Viney wrote:

> They do enjoy the quick turnaround time and the constant progress,  
> but some
> clients NEED documentation and waterfall-like processes. In many  
> cases they
> prefer the "measure twice cut once" approach as opposed to an  
> iterative
> approach where the focus is on communication and engagement not
> documentation. Agile development makes managing client expectations  
> and
> getting client approval a little bit more difficult. So we dev  
> Agile in
> house, but when doing client engagements we tend to break our  
> process into
> waterfall-like phases with deliverables for sign off.

We get a lot of push back from our clients as well, which is where  
the dialogue driven development (though I like saying dialogue driven  
design too) project came from. You can read more here: http:// 
www.dialogue-driven.org

>
> Our choice of Ruby on Rails for Web development has played a  
> significant
> role. In most of our recent work, the creative has actually taken  
> just as
> much or more time than the development. This allows our developers  
> to do
> multiple iterations in a similar amount of time it takes for a  
> client to
> approve the creative.

We also use Ruby on Rails and I would say the same thing. Design is  
taking just as much (or more) time than development, which is why my  
biggest problem seems to be timing. If I am only one iteration ahead  
of development, and end up needing more time, the dev team may get  
held up.

-Allison


-- 
Allison Beckwith
Co-Founder & Creative Director

PLANET ARGON, LLC
Ruby on Rails Development, Consulting & Hosting

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