I recently had the pleasure of chatting with three extraordinary individuals who have been practicing Agile for the past several years.

The purpose of this conversation was to provide listeners with a plain language explanation of the Agile process and it’s implications for the future of software development and also the potential impact this will have on the User Experience discipline.

I decided to provide the unedited version of our conversation to model the kind of flow that is created when organizations are able to bring in open minded and passionate individuals to the Scrum and subsequent Sprints for each project.

Alla Zollers (@azollers) is a Senior Experience Designer at Mad*Pow. She specializes in creating holistic experiences that elegantly balance customer needs, business goals, and technical constraints.

Alla has worked in completely agile environments for the past 2 years, creating designs that are iterative and always feasible to implement.

Ryan Norris (@ryannorris) is a technical architect at Medullan, a provider of business and technology services based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Medullan delivers best-in-class technology solutions for the health care and life sciences industries by engaging with clients to deliver product and market strategies that accelerate time to market, as well as vendor-neutral, Agile software solutions for enterprise needs for organizations large and small. Ryan also maintains a personal blog about agile software delivery and technology.

Zachary Spencer (@zspencer) has been practicing agile development for the past two years.

He has done everything from working as a developer in an agile environment to full blown agile transformations. He enjoys writing about his experiences on his blog.

Agile Resources
Agile Manifesto
Succeeding with Agile by Mike Chohn
Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug
Bridging the Communication Gap – Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing by Gojko Adzic
The Art of Agile Software Development by James Shore
Money Ball by Michael Lewis

Many thanks to my most recent sponsor, the Information Architecture Institute, for promoting my upcoming workshops on User Experience Design, Information Architecture, and Writing for the Web.

Thank you again to Chris Baum and Christina Wodtke of Boxes and Arrows for providing me with the opportunity to share presentations through the Boxes and Arrows Podcast at the 11th Annual IA Summit in Phoenix. I’m hoping to have these posted within a week or two of the Summit wrapping up on April 11th.