Agile – the bug workflow on your agile/Scrum team

The interaction designer

UX != UI You need a experienced interaction designer to deliver good user experience, contrary to popular belief that is not a programmer. For all of you programmers who think they can do UX (that includes me) let me say this. Getting good at interaction design requires at least as much time as getting good at programming. How much time have you spent doing pure interaction design?

In the initial phase it's the interaction designers responsibility to:

1. Extracting the actual goals of the solution from the product owner
2. Define the personas that will be using the solution.
3. Write scenarios that are stories on how the solution will be used.
4. Compile a design document that leaves little room for ambiguity from an UX standpoint

During the project it's the interaction designers task to make sure that those guidelines are followed and address any additional issues that will arise (and they will).

Many programmers will take afront to this approach I'm sure since everyone feel that they're the exception that can design "wonderful" interfaces, you're probably not. On the other hand a good interaction designer - programmer relation is often very nice for the programmer as well as they don't have to fight against a "stupid specification". Unfortunately good interaction designers are hard to find in my experience but they are out there.

As always I deeply recommend Alan Coopers books on the subject ("About Face" and "The Inmates are running the asylum")

Read this excellent article from Ron Jeffries and you will understand what needs to be done.

If you want to do Scrum, you have to follow the rules. If you don't follow the rules, it's not Scrum. And you shouldn't expect it to work.

There is plenty of space in Scrum to adapt the rules to the local team, but only once the basics have been mastered. This sounds like a prime example of a group of people who decided to alter the rules before they truly understood what they were doing. The principle of Shu-Ha-Ri applies here (and in many other places).