I've always wondered what the crossroad between agile development and user experience design would look like. I found a couple of presentations that start at addressing the issues.

These are presentations that are part of an event called The 7-Minute Soapbox on User Experience Design organized by/for user experience professionals community in Waterloo, Ontario.

• Tips for integrating user experience and agile development (video)
• An agile alternative to the ponderous usability test (video)
• User-centered design and agile development at NCR (video)

What's nice is that all the presentations are short and both the video and the slides (via slideshare are available together, so you can follow along.

The Tips for integrating user experience and agile development (video) presentation has some good pointers:

Now how does traditional user experience fit in with all this? I see three key challenges:

- Agile teams focus on stakeholders, designers focus on users.
- Agile teams focus on technical issues, designers focus on usability.
- Agile teams focus on modeling just-in-time, designers model up-front.

There is a tremendous opportunity to close the gap between these perspectives and I offer a few suggestions for an interaction designer on an agile team:

- Infuse user experience issues and approaches into the team — train them, let them know your world.
- Be the user advocate and lobbyist, especially with the product stakeholder.
- Use personas — make them physically visible and make sure they are present as the actor in every agile user story.
- Introduce user experience guidelines — good agile teams will follow them if you can show the value.
- Do just-enough user experience modeling — look for minor course corrections rather than Eureka moments.
- Use light-weight tools — whiteboards, index cards, pen and paper.
- Be a generalizing specialist — do whatever you can to help the team follow the agile mantra and “do the simplest thing that could possibly work.”

[this one's for you SC]

Commoncraft (who call themselves "social design consultants") has a series of very well-produced short videos called the commoncraft show that demystify "in Plain English" concepts that befuddle clients such as RSS, wikis and social networking. They are short, funny and extremely informative.

I got to this site by meandering through a Jared Spool article on Building an Envisionment which talks about creating the right presentation to illustrate a concept that will guide or inspire your project. Also worth a visit and good read.