I’ve tweeted a couple of times about a project I’m on where we’re doing a big up-front design. It’s a long project.
Every time I have, someone has replied back to me to tell me that if I’m doing a big up-front design, I’m not doing Agile correctly and I’m going to get burned.
Outside of the fact that it’s incredibly rude to tweet someone and tell them that their process (which the vast majority of us working in big companies get no control over) is wrong, there’s a problem here: there’s nothing wrong with big up-front design.
Explaining why front-loading a development process with a design process has been more difficult than I expected. My first draft was long and rambling. Turned out I really had three posts hiding within it.
My October 7 article for The Interconnected, Doing Agile Wrong: Design is not Development describes the difference between Agile and UX. It’ll be followed by an article on the difference between big up-front software design and big up-front product design. Then sometime after that, we’ll post the final article, which explains when big up-front (product) design is right for a project.