Title: The Broken Telephone Game of Defining Software and UI Requirements
Context: Every additional step in the process between your design and engineering teams is a potential point of failure that must be guarded against.
Synopsis: The PM takes the customer requirements and gives them to the UX designer. The UX designer specs the flow and hands them to the engineer. The engineer builds out the user story and sends it to the QA team. The QA team writes the necessary test cases and shows the results to the PM. The PM goes “WTF?!?!” Compartmentalization of the software building process is the quickest route to failure that there is. Instead of isolating everyone from the rest of the team and only forcing them to interact when circumstances dictate no other option remove all barriers and artificial handoff points in order to achieve the quickest route to success. Sure there is additional overhead as each player is required to sit through and learn the basics of everyone else’s role but the overall savings in the reduction of confusion and rework more than makes up for it. We are all one big happy family as long as we do everything in our power to act like one.
Best Bit: “One key approach to reduce the Broken Telephone effect is to avoid creating use cases, mockups, and storyboards as separate deliverables by combining them into one ‘integrated deliverable.’”
via uxmag.com
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