Does agile development affect usability?
David Churchville has a nice post that poses the question:
Does the agile software development mantra of "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work" lead to functional, but unremarkable software? [1]He continues by pointing to an example of when functionality might be chosen over usability.
It's an interesting thought, but I feel the main benefit of agile development is to test early and test often. This testing, if done properly, should help to find usability issues. And then, agile development really helps out by not only finding the issues, but by fixing them before they are released.
Said another way, in traditional software development, it seems all to common that when the deadline slips, one of the items that is often discarded is usability testing. Any early testing—while perhaps not true usability tests—will help out.
[1] Is Agile Development Killing Usability?, http://www.extremeplanner.com/blog/2006/07/is-agile-development-killing-usability.html, posted July 26, 2006, viewed, July 28, 2006 blog comments powered by Disqus