<aside> 💚 I had the opportunity to attend an event on Friday, June 5th run by @hiromitsuuuuu and @nolick1219, a Japanese designer and agile coach who noticed many disconnects between design and agile in the companies they are currently working at. The gathering was well-attended on Discord, lively and passionate, and since it was only in Japanese, I am writing up some translated notes for my fellow English-speakers to spark discussion between both groups.

A paper was initially written to introduce the topic to the gathering attendees, which I'll translate below. Afterwards, I'll provide a summary of notes from the gathering. ~ @chostett

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What is the purpose of this paper?

This gathering was spurred by some light discussion between myself, @hiromitsuuuuu and agile coach @nolick1219 and a tweet which generated more interest than I expected. The scope of this issue is broad, and as the background and the aim of integration is not well understood, I tried to sum it up in a tweet at first.

https://twitter.com/hiromitsuuuuu/status/1263815941965484032?s=20

Tweet text: I'm thinking about doing a loose gathering with the topic of, "scrum and design don't seem to get along." Anyone interested?

So why do this?

For a while, I've been speaking with designer @ksmxxxxxx about how do we effectively do UI design and UX validation loops within the scrum process. These are the sorts of things that come up:

• "Can you "complete" UX tasks within a sprint? Is it possible to work synchronously with the development team?"
• "Personally, I don't think UX and scrum fit together. In particular, UX often has validation cycles that sometimes don't fit in one team iteration [say, a sprint]. Even in UI design, it can be difficult to work synchronously with the development team and still go through proper iterations."
• "When an item in the backlog is "ready," does that mean "Ready for UI Design," or are we saying development is just a manufacturing process (i.e. "Ready for Development")?"
• "How do you create synergy (flow) between design and development in a scrum environment?"

We invite you to think and talk outside your respective fields. This gathering would like us to talk lightly about what we think about these questions and can this relationship [between scrum and design] be improved.

Memos on talking points

• Do you think that the definition of a "scrum iteration" also includes UX tasks such as research, user interviews or user tests?
  • The purpose of the above question is to understand how organizations that are actively using scrum in their development cycles "season" (is that the right word?) their cycles with UX improvements and how this is working within the organization. In other words, we'd like to hear about various use cases of scrum and design working together.
    • For instance, in one of ksm's prior organizations, the PO demo and sprint review were considered scrum activities, but user testing was considered separate because it was done by someone inside the team.
    • User interviews had separate planning sessions to our scrum events (by a group called the Product Team). It was going somewhat well, somehow (I didn't have a lot of visibility into the Product Team's progress as I was part of the development team).
    • When we started scrum, over time our refactoring was reduced, which was good. But sometimes the management would insert themselves into the team with new, reckless plans and interrupt our flow. I initially thought, "well, it can't be helped" because our company was getting larger, but on the other hand I thought, if they kept sidelining us, what the heck were we doing scrum for? (laughs)
    • The development team cycles and the UX validation and design cycles had never fit together well, and theoretically we were practicing what was written in Lean UX, but it never seemed to stick. There were people asking, "Were teams really able to make it work?" "Isn't there another way?"

Notes from the Gathering

<aside> 💚 From here on out, I'll be lightly translating notes on the session. These were taken from the Mural and the chatting from Discord done live during the meeting.

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What was initially supposed to be a "small gathering" turned into a large gathering on Discord. @hiromitsuuuuu and @nolick1219 initially expected only 5~8 people, but 20 showed up from all sorts of fields (design, agile, development, scrum master).

The session was lively and turned into a lot of others sharing pain about scrum and design integration, which I've captured here. I think perhaps this may have been a therapy session?

Talking point requests from the participants

• Doing Scrum and UX iterations at the same time is hard...