Continuous Discovery: The Next Agile Frontier

The practice of creating design specs that are two hundred pages long, then punting to a development team, is slowly becoming a thing of the past, as modern development teams adopt Agile.  But popular Agile frameworks like Scrum still assume the existence of a backlog of user stories from which the work starts. 

So how do you get an Agile project started on the right foot? And once you begin development, how can Agile teams best incorporate the continued learning that Agile enables, with an eye on the greater goals of a project? 

This session will explore some techniques and challenges for “Continuous Discovery” in an Agile project, and specifically with Drupal projects. 

We’ll cover some techniques for planning and executing a Discovery sprint for a Drupal project, and how to organize Agile teams that are aligned with the web product’s business goals and end user needs.  Specifically, we’ll look at how the User Story Mapping approach can help you avoid the dreaded “flat backlog”, and set your team up for continuous learning in each sprint. 

Finally, we’ll outline some problematic client, design, and development patterns that you should watch out for, and how to adpt in order to keep the focus on end user value.