Agile is now the most commonly used methodology for organizations that want to reduce risks involved in shipping new features and products. Agile helps companies to make huge workflow improvements but it’s not a guarantee that agile teams will always build successful products and features. Time is a scarce resource. In the case of developers, it’s even more limited in supply. In an ideal world, developers would spend 100% of their time building new features and products. But the reality is that they spend around half of their time doing rework that could’ve been avoided. Also, fixing an error after development can cost up to 100 times more than what it would before development. So, how can these mistakes be avoided? How do you reduce the uncertainty and prevent your products and features from failure?

Consider Remote User Testing

While hiring a usability testing company for user testing can reap significant benefits like providing user insights and using them to ensure improved customer experience, teams often end up not testing their products with real users. The reason: Extra time, effort, and cost of recruiting users to come into the office, setting up labs, and moderating the session. This process can take days or even weeks. Agile teams can’t afford to put their time here. A simple solution to this problem is remote user testing. Remote user testing lets you get video recordings of real people from your target market as they use any prototype, mobile app, website as they share their thoughts while completing the tasks you specify. Some remote user testing platforms also allow you to recruit your exact target audience and get feedback in a matter of hours. A new design or user flow can be tested by your team with a single sprint, validating that they’ve made the right decision as the feature is built. The process can be started with sketched concepts and extended through live code, prototypes, and wireframes. All it needs is a relatively small investment of time and money early in the process so that you can validate your product decisions before investing in development and prevent your team from building the features and products that users don’t want.

Run Parallel Development and Design Sprints

An effective method leading companies practice to incorporate user tests into their agile development cycle is to have their appointed usability testing company or their own design team (product managers, user researchers, visual designers, and UI/UX designers) run a design sprint parallel to their development team. Design sprint’s purpose is to:

• Do user research to identify problems
• Leverage iterative testing to validate solutions
• Prepare user stories for the product owner to prioritize in time for the Iteration Planning Meeting

That way, your design team identifies problems and validates the solutions for your developers to work on in their next iteration while your engineers write code for their current iteration.