Adding User

Tests to Your
Agile Process
IMPLEMENTING REMOTE USER TESTING INTO YOUR AGILE PROCESSS

Introduction
Agile has become the go-to development methodology for organizations that want to reduce
the risk involved in shipping new products and features. But even though agile has helped many
companies make huge workflow improvements, agile teams can still end up building products
and features that nobody wants.

Developers’ time is extremely valuable. In a perfect world, developers would spend 100% of their
time building new products and features. In reality, an estimated 50% of engineering time is spent
on doing rework that could have been avoided.1 What’s more, fixing an error after development is
up to 100 times as expensive as it would have been before.2

So how do you avoid making these mistakes? How do you reduce uncertainty and prevent the
overall failure of the products and features your team ships? If you’re waiting to get user feedback
until your developers have built the product, then you’re waiting way too long.

With remote user testing, you can get video recordings (with audio) of real people from your
target market as they use any website, mobile app, or prototype—speaking their thoughts out
loud while they complete tasks you specify. And with some remote user testing platforms, you
can recruit your exact target audience and get feedback within an hour.

Your team can test a new design or user flow within a single sprint, validating that they’ve made
the right decision as the feature is built. The process can start with sketched concepts and
extend through wireframes, prototypes, and live code.

“Observe as actual people use and interact with your website [or app]

‘‘ while they’re commenting their thought process out loud.”

– Peep Laja, Founder of ConversionXL

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IMPLEMENTING REMOTE USER TESTING INTO YOUR AGILE PROCESSS

In this whitepaper, we’ll lay out a process inspired by companies like Google, Facebook, and
Home Depot, that successfully implement remote user testing into their agile development
process. Use this process as a jumping off point and modify it to suit the specific needs
of your organization.

By making a relatively small investment of time and money early in the process, you can validate
your product decisions before investing in development, and prevent your team from building
products and features that users don’t want.

‘‘ User testing gives you direct input on how

real users use your site [or app]. You may
have designed what you believe is the
best user experience in the world, but
watching real people interact with your
[product] is often a humbling experience.
Because you are not your user.”

– Peep Laja, Founder of ConversionXL

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IMPLEMENTING REMOTE USER TESTING INTO YOUR AGILE PROCESSS

Run Parallel Design And Development

Sprints
Many leading companies find that the most effective way to incorporate user tests into their
agile development cycle is to have their UI/UX designers, user researchers, and/or product
managers (which we’ll refer to as your design team throughout this whitepaper, for simplicity)
run a design sprint parallel to their development team.

The purpose of the design sprint is to:

Identify problems through user research

Validate solutions through iterative testing

Prepare user stories for the Product Owner to prioritize in time for
the Iteration Planning Meeting (a.k.a. Backlog Review)

That way, while your engineers are writing code for their current iteration, your design team is
identifying the problems and validating the solutions for your developers to work on in their
next iteration. Some people refer to this parallel process as Iteration Zero because the design
team is always one step ahead of the development team.

Problem / Design prototype

opportunity and user test for
meeting validation

DESIGN

User User
Start here research stories

Standard design and

development parallel
workflow process. Iteration
planning
meeting

Meeting to break DEVELOPMENT Iteration demo

down tasks and review

Build software
and user test for
validation
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IMPLEMENTING REMOTE USER TESTING INTO YOUR AGILE PROCESSS

Design Sprint
1 User Research

On day 1, either the Product Owner, UI/UX designer, or user researcher digs into metrics from
the existing version of the live product to identify where the problem areas are. Then they run 3-5
user tests focused on those areas to identify what’s causing users to get
stuck or confused. If they launch their user tests in the morning, they’ll have results by the time
they get back from lunch.

Note: If you’re developing an entirely new product, use this stage to do exploratory
research. Run user tests on your competitors’ products, or have your target audience
show you how they currently handle the problem your product will solve.

2 Problem & Opportunity Meeting

On day 2, the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and UI/UX designer meet to discuss the problems
that were identified through user research. Participants of this meeting should come prepared
with metric data and video clips from user tests to use as evidence and guide the discussion.
Once your team has defined the problems, start brainstorming potential solutions. The goal is to
leave this meeting with a concept for your UI/UX designer to run with.

3 Test Mockups And Prototypes

Once a solution has been identified, your designer starts mocking up a solution. Once they have
something they can put in front of users to get feedback, they run a user test. Then they iterate
on their design based on the feedback they get. They continue to repeat this process—moving
from wireframes to low-fidelity prototypes and finally to high-fidelity prototypes—until they
validate that the solution solves the problem as intended.

4 Prepare User Stories

Once a design solution has been validated, the Product Owner and Scrum Master meet to get the
user stories into the backlog and prioritized. Each card should include relevant design assets and
video clips to back up prioritization decisions.

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IMPLEMENTING REMOTE USER TESTING INTO YOUR AGILE PROCESSS

Now that the user stories have been prepared, the Product Owner and engineering
team will kick off the development sprint with an Iteration Planning Meeting.

At this point, the design team will repeat the same process over again to prepare
validated solutions for the next development sprint.

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IMPLEMENTING REMOTE USER TESTING INTO YOUR AGILE PROCESSS

Development Sprint
1 Iteration Planning Meeting (i.e. Backlog Review)

On day 1 of the development sprint, the Product Owner and development team meet for the
Iteration Planning Meeting. The Product Owner presents the prioritized backlog, the engineers
choose which user stories they’re going to work on during the sprint, and those stories get
moved into the sprint backlog.

2 Tactical Meeting

Next, the Product Owner brings the development team together for another meeting where they
look at the cards in the sprint backlog, break them down into the specific tasks they’re going
to do over the next iteration and discuss tactical details.

3 Build Software

Now that everything has been planned out, the development team starts building software for
the length of the iteration cycle.

4 Validate Solutions

Once a solution has been built, either have your engineer or Product Owner run a user test to
validate that it’s solving the problem as intended. Use the same test script as you did for the
user test that was originally used to identify the problem. This will give you a benchmark to judge
whether the solution has actually fixed the issue (and maybe even uncover new issues, which
should be funneled into your product backlog for future iterations).

5 Iteration Review

Finally, hold an Iteration Review where the team demonstrates the software they just built
during the sprint. Share video clips from your user tests that demonstrate that the solution you
built has been validated and solves the problem.

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IMPLEMENTING REMOTE USER TESTING INTO YOUR AGILE PROCESSS

Repeat The Parallel Sprint Process

At this point, the design team will have gone through another sprint and prepped the next round
of user stories. Both teams repeat their iteration cycles in parallel, with the design sprint always
one step ahead, preparing validated solutions for the development team to deploy.

One of the best ways to get the insights you will need to identify the right problems to address
and validate solutions is to select the right tools and resources. Choose a platform that will help
you rapidly understand how users interact with your product—including where they get confused,
frustrated, or fail to make sense of your iterations.

“If you keep extending or tweaking a product based on your own

‘‘ hypotheses, but without user data, how confident can you be that
your assumptions match reality? And if you run user tests only as an
afterthought, and discover that your initial hypotheses are invalid by the
time you’re about to ship a major release, the cost to changing course is
enormous.”

– Edmond Lau, Engineer at Quip

“The videos and quotes were immediately actionable.”

‘‘ – Carey Caulfield, Product Manager at Citrix Convoi

UserTesting can be a key component of your customer experience research toolkit.

To find out how UserTesting can help you generate rapid customer insights from
your target market, request a free trial of our Enterprise platform today.

1. Usability.gov, Benefits of User-Centered Design. http://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/benefits-of-ucd.html

2. Dr. Susan Weinschenk, The ROI of User Experience. https://youtu.be/O94kYyzqvTc

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About UserTesting

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