This group has the goal of connecting the usability community to the agile development community – and both these groups to the business community they both serve.

The usability community has a lot of guidance to offer software development on requirements elicitation, product design, user interaction and interface design, and usability testing.

The agile community offers the potential for higher software quality by way of agile development techniques. The agile community offers the potential for the business community to reap larger benefits through incremental delivery which might allow businesses to earn return on software sooner, or cease development on unprofitable projects before too much capital is sacrificed.

But, agile software development approaches described so far seem to give short shrift to usability practices. If you’re from the agile community and disagree with that statement, this is the group where you may want to say so.

Many folks from the usability community seem to disagree with agile approaches in particular notions such as emergent design and incremental delivery. Those proficient in usability practices believe that failing to gather and act on critical user data short changes the users of the software and the software’s subsequent usability and value to the users and owners of that software. If you’re from the usability community and disagree with anything in those statements, this is the group where you may want to say so.

I have hopes that this groups might move forward to:
* Define usability roles on agile projects
* Define a basic body of usability knowledge all members of a project should understand
* Describe essential usability practices usable on agile projects – practices that are lighter weight and more collaborative
* Describe where specific financial returns are for including usability practices on agile projects

Lurkers are very welcome.
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