Agile – who should move the sprint status to complete in agile scrum model

Is this normal for agile or just an excuse for not wanting to write it?

My theory is that it's why agile spread so fast, especially scrum. I've seen too many team wanting agile to protect themselves (instead of the whole company). The problem is that in many case, the methodology is used against them by management (because they want to protect themselves too!).

Does this means agile doesn't work at all? Of course not, this just means that agile helps you to solve few common problems, but you are still in charge of all the others. And in many case agile is just not suitable for that team in that company.

What are the industry norm for documentation in agile projects to record development requirements, designs, key decisions and context?

To be short:

The team should define how much documentation they need

They know the domain, they are the experts and more importantly they build the thing!

That's what Working software over comprehensive documentation in the Agile Manifesto means.

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")