Agile Usability Testing

Agile development has become mainstream in the past few years, and for thousands of companies around the world, it has succeeded in reducing risk and delivering more value for less money. Yet, with the emphasis on pleasing the customer, and the philosophy of doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, there's one area where agile development has fallen short of more traditional methodologies-creating highly usable software. Practices such as test-driven development and continuous integration show little concern for the end-user experience. John De Goes explains the importance of creating humane software, and explains how he has integrated user-interface design and usability testing into the tight feedback loop that is the hallmark of agile development processes. John illustrates this process with snippets from usability tests that he has conducted, feedback from end users, and data on how usability testing improves the customers' ROI.