Agile UX - Still some challenges, but I love it

Wintery Sprint Burndown :-)

I'm working in a company where agile was implemented several years ago - for me personally I work in agile projects since 2007. I'm a big fan of agile methodologies and I think it is the best process for the kind of software we are working on. I like the close collaboration between the various roles in one team and the early feedback from the customer.

Still I think there is a challenge for implementing UX in an agile process. For me personally the biggest challenge is the continues change of the UI and the interactions. Because additional functionalities are developed over a long period of time it's sometimes hard to integrate new functionalities in an optimal way. Often a UI "refactoring" would be necessary but the costs are at the moment very high and it's hard to convince oneself and the team that THIS bigger change is neccessary NOW.

In the last weeks and months I found the following interesting sources for Agile & UX:

• UserZoom published a free e-book "The Essential Guide to Integrating User Experience and Usability Testing in Agile" (registration neccessary): Nice overview of agile methods and some concrete suggestions like "A good rule of thumb is a 1:4 ratio of designers to developers. Also be sure to allocate project budget to user research and usability evaluation, ideally 10% of budget is a good target if possible."
• Lean UX - a great book by Jeff Gothelf
• One year ago Hoa Loranger of the Nielsen Norman Group published an article about "Doing UX in an agile world" with some interesting findings of case studies and a nice summary of the topic and the main challenges.