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Second International Conference on Usage-Centered Design

TOPIC - XP/Agile Methods

PRE-CONFERENCE TUTORIALS
SUNDAY - 19 October

B1 - 9:00a-5:00p

From Usage-Centered Design to Object-Oriented Design

Robert Biddle, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Usage-Centered Design has introduced new principles for beginning the design of user interfaces. This tutorial teaches you how these same ideas can be used to link to Object-Oriented Design of systems. In particular, you will learn how task cases can work together with responsibility-driven design to increase guidance during design and increase traceability between requirements and design. This also turns out to be a good way to learn object-oriented design, and for user interface designers and system developers to learn more about each others’ world. The tutorial also shows how these techniques relate to ideas in agile methods and to object-oriented design patterns.

B4 - 9:00a-5:00p

Agile Usage-Centered Modeling for Setting Scope, Goals, and Priorities

Jeff Patton, Tomax Corporation

Agile development methodologies advocate deferring design decisions as long as possible. This is commonly misinterpreted to mean “don’t design.” While leaving options open is valued, agile methodologies also place strong emphasis on understanding what goals the software should meet to provide value to its users. The methods and models found in Usage-Centered Design are ideally suited to help users and developers collaborate to discover those goals and their priorities. This tutorial will provide you with hands on experience using collaborative card-based techniques to explore a real-world business problem and successfully identify and model user roles, tasks and interaction contexts. You’ll see how you can easily involve developers and end-users to provide valuable shared understanding of the project goals. We’ll engage in this process with the explicit goal of arriving at a prioritized list of features and a project schedule that can feed easily into your favorite agile methodology. You’ll walk away with a clear understanding of how to use Usage-Centered Design to jump-start an agile project with the strong set of goals and priorities that are key to any projects success.

MONDAY

M21 - 11:00a-12:30p

Designing for Breakthroughs in User Performance

Jeannine Strope, McKesson

Supporting users who have hundreds of mission-critical tasks—performed outside of the actual software yet recorded in the software application—requires a task-driven design with a streamlined, efficient, almost anticipatory workflow. McKesson Clinicals took the opportunity to revamp and rewrite legacy applications using usage-centered design to create a world class clinical system. Along the way we reached great heights in design and encountered great pitfalls in technology and temperament, all the while trying to balance market demand with design priorities. This session presents our hands-on design and lessons learned in employing usage centered design with an agile development process to create task-critical applications..

M31 - 1:30p-3:00p

Usage-Centered Design in Extreme Programming and Agile Software Development Environments

Jeff Patton, Tomax Corporation

Agile development methodologies, and Extreme Programming in particular, advocate deferring design decisions till the last possible minute. How in this type of environment can you successfully practice Usage-Centered Design or other sound user interface and interaction design practices? This presentation will give an overview of Agile development concepts and Extreme Programming as a specific and most popular Agile methodology. In fact, Usage-Centered Design modeling techniques work well to generate the broad scope and priorities necessary to make agile development methodologies work well. The session discusses using Usage-Centered Design as a quick collaborative approach for gathering requirements and building functional design. Learn how to use Usage-Centered Design artifacts such as role and task models to drive project planning and keep development focused on the most important thing: producing software actually usable by people.

TUESDAY - 21 October

T10 - 8:30a-10:00a

Between Extreme and Unified: Where Are the Users and Usability in Development Processes?

Ivar Jacobson, Jaczone; Jim Heumann, IBM; Ron Jeffries, XProgramming.com; Jeff Patton, Tomax Corp.; Larry Constantine (Moderator)

In a lively and informative format, this plenary panel will bring together two opposing teams of authoritative panelists to compare how users, usability, and user interface design fit into modern software development. Challenges from the moderator and questions from the audience will shape a critical examination of the relative strengths and shortcomings of competing approaches across the spectrum of processes ranging from XP to RUP. .

T22 - 10:30a-12:00n

Can Designers Dance? Surviving Agile Teams and Astringent Customers

Arlen Bankston, C.C. Pace Systems

Interaction design’s multifaceted nature and varied constituents have often led to confused roles, bruised egos, and broken teams. The successful design practitioner blends technical and aesthetic skills with those of the diplomat, defusing conflicts, supporting positions, and engineering constructive compromises. This presentation will demonstrate how the interaction designer can work within agile methods such as Extreme Programming to bring peace, goodwill and usable products to the most fractious projects. Case studies will illustrate how this role has been maneuvered to a pivotal position in several initially hostile environments.

T33 - 1:30p-3:00p

Iterative Project Planning with Extreme Programming

Chet Hendrickson, Independent Consultant; Ron Jeffries, XProgramming.com

What does it take to build software iteratively, in a way that satisfies the customer and supports your company's bottom line? This session will explore how Extreme Programming and Essential Use Cases can be used to build software solutions that meet your organization’s needs. Learn how the planning decisions you make can impact your project and your company. Find out how Essential Use Cases and the practices of Extreme Programming work together to support successful iterative, customer-centered development.

T41 - 3:30p-5:00p

Agile Customer-Side Practices

Tom Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC

Extreme Programming and other agile methods are quite specific about developer side practices and how the developer side and customer side interact, but they are silent on how to create an effective user interface. This presentation advocates usage centered design as the core of customer side practices. Incremental development of essential use cases and essential UI models can fit naturally into the iteration cycles of an agile project. Essential use cases are then extended to full-dress form so that functional customer tests can be directly specified from the essential use cases. These tests tell the developer side when they are done with a collection of stories. This presentation also discusses the practice of evolving and using a ubiquitous domain language for the project to ensure that business rules and domain concepts are accurately implemented and validated. The domain language is used in the use cases, the essential user interface model, the code, and the tests.

WEDNESDAY - 22 October

W22 - 10:30a-12:00n

Lean Feature-Driven Development of Interaction Designs

David Anderson, uidesign.net; Brian O’Byrne, JStateMachine Project

Lean Feature-Driven Development using Statechart modeling and Mediator Pattern can reduce variation in UI development with precise, right-the-first-time implementation of the interaction designer’s intent. In this approach, content models are elaborated into Statecharts that can be directly mapped to an MVC Type-II architecture and Mediator Pattern. With minor extensions, Statecharts can model complex application behavior and be mapped into UI features for tracking in Feature Driven Development. Statecharts drawn using UML modeling tools can be exported in XMI and imported into the JStateMachine engine implementing table driven Mediator and Command patterns in either a Web Servlet or JFC (Swing) environment.

W23 - 10:30ap-12:00n

Adopting Agility: Usability and Design for Extreme Programming and Other Agile Methods

Gary Macomber, HumanCentric Design; Thyra Rauch, IBM

Agile methods and extreme programming are a radical shift in product development. The challenge to usage-centered design is to adapt to complement these styles or risk losing a place at the table. A major problem with usage-centered design is the perception that development is held up until the front end work is complete, the front end work being mostly usage-centered design activities. Thus, many perceive usage-centered design as being “too costly” for development schedules. Do usage-centered design practitioners have to abandon their methods to work with agile development styles? NO! This work is even more critical in agile approaches. Traditional software development is done in stages: discovery, design, development, and deployment. All the work on each stage is completed before the next stage starts. In contrast, the agile styles get something to the user quickly and create mini-products in each iteration by going through all of the stages. We believe that many usage-centered design methods can easily be meshed with agile methods. By their very nature, these front-end methods focus on the most important things first, which means that you can develop in short iterations, and work from global to specific in critical chunks.

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Full Program

Pre-Conference Tutorials

Plenary Sessions

Short Presentations

TOPIC THREADS -

User Performance & Performance Support

XP/Agile Methods