XPColumbus

Next Meeting: June 24th,  2009

Agenda:
11:30-11:45am Networking
11:45- 12:00pm XP discussion topic of the month:  How do you dialog with customers and/or users to establish requirements or estimate effort? What difficulties have you experienced when doing this?

12:00- 1:00pm Dr. Martha Lindeman presents: Improve Speed of Delivery and Minimize Rework with User Modeling

Date and Time:

Next XP User Group meeting will be held 11:30 am to 1 pm, June 24th, 2009 at the OCLC Kilgour Building presentation room. Click here for directions.

Improve Speed of Delivery and Minimize Rework with User Modeling

This talk describes how to improve speed of delivery and minimize risk by doing user modeling within Beck and Fowler’s eXtreme Programming (XP) life cycle.  User modeling identifies what users will do as they interact with a system.  The modeling process starts early in the project by identifying users’ access points, roles, and goals. This provides a top-down overview of the new system without the disadvantages of big, up-front design. Then the user goals are detailed as task sequences on an as-needed basis as the project progresses. This provides the advantages of agile development without the risks of ‘bottom-up’ design.

Including user modeling in a software project yields benefits in three major areas:

1. Requirements:  All user goals are identified even though the functional tasks supporting all of the goals are not identified.
2. Design: User-interface tradeoffs can be considered to minimize (a) rework for developers and (b) relearning for users.
3. Validation:   The user modeling can be directly converted into testing requirements for software verification and validation.

About the Presenter
Dr. Martha Lindeman
For 20+ years, Dr. Martha Lindeman has been a consultant in discovering user requirements and then translating them into design decisions that produce the desired results. She received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Harvard University in 1985, and immediately applied her knowledge of human learning and behavior to the design of interactive computer systems.  She was a part co-author for the first draft of the current ISO standard for usability (ISO 9241).  As President of Agile Interactions, Inc., she created and refined an agile process for designing user interfaces in any type of software life cycle.

Dr. Lindeman has two goals for any software project: (1) create easy-to-learn, easy-to-use user interfaces, and (2) reduce the time required for design and development. Her design projects include Internet, desktop, mobile, interactive-voice response, and multimedia projects.  Her facilitation and training activities improve communication, teamwork and decision-making within a project.  Her alphabetical client list starts with AT&T and ends with Xerox, and includes many other well-known companies.