Ooooh... controversial! ;)
I’ve just booked my place at the XPDay 2005 conference, happening in London at the end of the month. It’ll be my third year in a row, but it’s the first time I’ve struggled to find stuff in the programme that will maintain my interest throughout. There even seems to be an unfilled slot in the schedule at the end of the second day. It’s making me wonder, “Has the agile bubble burst?”. [more...]
Last year, the programme was chock full of interesting topics, many of them being discussed as fairly fresh issues in the community. There was even a session on how usability work can survive in an agile environment. Usability, after all, benefits from the kind of holistic treatment that agile development so abhors. The only conclusion I could draw at the end of the talks was that the two are not particularly comfortable bed fellows.
Sure, it’s still possible to create great UIs with an agile approach, but frequent releases containing frequent redesigns to cater for evolving feature sets can put a strain on customer relationships. It’s only a particularly perverse user who revels in re-learning interaction and navigation every month or so.
Anyway, I’ve seen nothing in the past year that suggests the agile community has resolved these opposing forces. Perhaps it’s run out of answers? And perhaps that’s reflected in this year’s XPDay programme? Or maybe the lack of outstanding new presentations is down to the discipline coming to maturity. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find out on the 28th and 29th.
P.S. Gav and Linz: please don’t take this as me dissing your presentation. I’m just giving a general impression of the programme. While I’ll be skipping your talk, it’s only because I know I can chat to you guys any time I like. :)
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