About a little over a year ago, I got bored and decided to start a fight on Twitter; you know – as you do; as I do. And I asked Design Twitter, "What do you hate about agile?" And then just to kind of kick the hornet's nest a little more, I asked product folks the same thing, and I got a few responses! I got kind of a lot of responses, actually, and some of them were really interesting, and a lot of them were really similar, and the complaints all seemed to fall into these few different categories.
But the biggest similarity was that *none of the things* that people were complaining about *seemed particularly agile* to me – at least, I mean they weren't the kind of agile teams that I had been on or led, and I got kind of interested and I ended up having these more in-depth conversations with a bunch of folks. So, I did more research because – you know – *of course* I did; I am a user-centered designer – kind of my thing. For this research, we got people to tell us stories about their teams,
and what they considered agile to be, what worked, what didn't, what they loved, what they hated, especially what they hated, because those are always the most fun stories. They're also why I won't be identifying any of the research respondents by name here. They were all promised confidentiality, and I don't burn my sources. Anyway, I got stories from literally hundreds of people, and again I had more in-depth conversations with lots of them, trying to get sort of a range of folks. I didn't just talk to designers. I talked to product people, engineers, some folks at agencies, big companies, small companies, obviously designers.
I even talked to people working in governments. What I *rarely saw* was something that I would describe as *an actually agile team*. I started working with the Interaction Design Foundation to write a course for new designers. And I decided to write a course about designing for agile teams because based on their research it was something that *their* students had been asking for for a bunch, and it turns out the designers I had chatted with weren't the only ones who had trouble figuring out
how to design on agile or agile-ish teams, which is not surprising.