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I lead a UX design team that is currently engaging with our devs in a waterfall-esque manner. I'm looking to integrate design with engineering within a Scrum process. I've read dozens of articles, a few books, done some online training, etc. None of it addresses how to integrate design considerations.
How can we integrate UX design into our Scrum framework?
I've done Agile UX (UX within an agile SCRUM team) some years ago and doing it in-team and within the sprint isn't feasible. It's just "naive", because Agile is a developer workflow, not a design workflow.
I struggled a while until I recognized the many problems, that occur with that working style and looked around for help - and it is a quite common problem UX teams will encounter doing agile.
However Agile UX is great, fast and compelling - you must to loose paperwork and talk and work with protoypes as specs. I love that way of working.
Best Agile UX practise is to:
Desiree Sy and John Schrag made a good presentation for CHI 2012 how they mastered this challenge at Autodesk.
Good luck
Scrum uses just-in-time analysis and design in its iterative development model. This certainly includes UX.
It is up to your self-organizing team to coordinate with one another to ensure that prerequisites like analysis and design are performed in a timely way, and that task and story dependencies are handled as efficiently as possible within the team and within each sprint. The Scrum process treats UX as an equal partner with development, testing, and documentation, so your team should too.
The Scrum framework promotes just-in-time design, where the requirements, analysis, and design for each feature are performed within the same sprint as the development and testing of the feature. The iterative development model certainly creates some rework or refactoring, but that's the accepted trade-off to avoid "big up-front design."
The key to integrating your UX design in Scrum is to ensure that UX designers are fully integrated into your Scrum team. They should be full team members, and should work alongside the developers and testers within each sprint.
User stories that include UX components should be included on the Product Backlog, and estimated and accepted into each sprint just like any other user story. For stories where it doesn't make sense to have separate UX design stories, you will want to include UX design within your Definition of Done and make sure that your Sprint Backlog includes the necessary tasks for the current sprint.
There a couple of ways to approach the challenge, but (like some others have said) trying to force it into a framework that is meant for execution and measurement will just frustrate you.
Instead I recommend looking at models that are meant to complement the execution of known features. Some have described it as a "dual track" model, where you have some focused on discovering the next feature and other focused on the sprint execution of features already discovered. You can learn a little more about it in an Aaron Sanders Blog Post. Aaron co-founded CoMakers with Jeff Patton and this article dates from his time there.
The problem with the term and drawing unfortunately though are that it lets people believe they can still tie it up in a nice pretty process box, but discovery and figuring out what to do next can get messy. That is why Scrum STARTS with a backlog at the beginning. Product Discovery and UX help you get a better backlog.
Here is my version that I use to explain the concept, but it is in now way meant to represent "the way".
The main points is that you have a team that has to play different roles and work that is in different stages, but the basic idea is that ideas go through a discovery, experiment and validation process and IF validated get added to a backlog that a team can pick up in a sprint and then those feature, once delivered, should be measured or looked at for new ideas to start again. One other think to note is that the "discovery loops" are not meant to show any time or size or velocity, but they should fast, continuous and valuable.
This is hard stuff and requires a lot of dedicated people and trust, since you aren't scheduling discovery.
Good luck!
Altough I realize this is an old question I believe it is still relevant. I am currently in the same situation. That is, trying to figure out how to best implement the UX perspective into a scrum process.
We do not have the resources to allocate a UX-designer per se in the scrum team but we do have different people responsible for areas such as navigation, design and accessibility - all of the essential components of the user experience.
Our current solution to this (which granted could very well change during the course of the proejct) is to let design manuals, accessibility checklists and navigation principles guide the developers in their efforts to solve the user stories/tasks at hand.
We also realised early on that there could be user stories where the answer could not be found in those guidelines or where it could become a matter of interpretation. Therefore we've opted for a "UX-group" made up of the three people responsible for design, navigation and accessibility, together with a external consultant (for an outside-perspective). This group will look at the prioritised user stories and have the mandate to add UX-relevant acceptance criteria to them, to further guide the developers and promote a holistic approach to the user experience.
In framework, you can use two ways Dual Track or Spikes. I've investigated this question, here is more detailed information https://medium.com/softserve-do/design-in-scrum-framework-d9abab28b05b And how UX professionals should participate in Scrum ceremonies, I like this article from Norman Nielsen Group https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-scrum/
