Agile or Not, You Need a Proper Customer and User Experience Process
The customer is king. From time to time, it feels like that idea is forgotten when a piece of software is being developed, tested, and released for mass consumption. It’s the user whom the product is being made for, and because of this, it’s critical to not only listen to this person, but also incorporate his feedback.
In order to satisfy the people you hope will either purchase or download your software, a proper customer and user experience process has to be built into the software development lifecycle. Whether you follow an agile, waterfall, or completely different methodology, this is a step that can’t be skipped.
It’s also something that Neeraj Tripathi, Vice President of Global QA at Infor, strongly endorses. Speaking to StickyMinds in a recent interview, Tripathi proposed two approaches: the proactive approach and the reactive approach.
One smart way to push a proactive approach is to make one of your customer representatives a stakeholder who signs off on the scope, types, and tools surrounding your testing approach. This, along with the power to sign-off on the conditions and cases of the testing, gives the customer greater power in the testing process. Their voice can be heard before the software is ready for mass consumption.
But one major thing you want to avoid is being purely proactive and just moving on to the next project once the software is live. Some of the most in-depth, important work comes after an application or other type of project is released, and that’s why you need a reactive approach.
Tripathi encourages teams to call meetings with your customer success managers regularly to keep track of customer issues and priorities. Once you determine which issues are software related, you can update the product and adapt your test strategy to ensure fewer issues in the future. Thus, you’re not only helping your customers, but your customers are helping you improve and make better products.
Again, the methodology here isn’t what matters. But, if you do rely on agile, Tripathi does have additional advice.
“For an agile environment, it is important to have robust and automated regression, as customer requests and enhancement are already being tested iteratively as part of agile development,” he said. “Business-critical functions and customer feedback should constantly be incorporated into the regression to ensure that a new release is not going to disrupt your customer’s environment/applications.”
The customer isn’t always right—just ask any server at a restaurant whose table asked for a refund on a steak after completely cleaning the plate. However, in software, the user can do wonders to improve your user experience, improve your testing process, and allow you to develop things that people really want.
