Tracking Research Questions, Assumptions, and Facts in Agile

Summary: User-related questions and assumptions are not tracked throughout a product’s lifecycle, causing misalignment and overconfidence. Documenting these questions and assumptions in a knowledge board differentiates them from real facts.

User research can be difficult to conduct in Agile environments and, due to time or budget constraints, teams tend to make assumptions about their users in order to move forward in the development process. In an ideal world we want to make decisions based on actual data, but sometimes we have to make assumptions first and test them later.

An assumption is something we take on faith or as a best guess despite a lack of proof. We can’t know everything about users or their environment before starting a project, so some assumptions are usually necessary. The danger with assumptions is that they are often treated the same as facts later in the project, when team members forget that the assumptions have a shaky base. But decisions based on incorrect assumptions can have serious consequences, so teams need to be aware of their assumptions by properly documenting them and creating action plans to turn them into real data.

With all of the moving parts in an Agile process, formally tracking questions and assumptions is commonly neglected. In this article, we show how Agile teams can track and test assumptions.