Effect of agile development process on designers

As part of the run-up to the UI11 conference, the folks at User Interface Engineering posted a good explanatory interview with Jeff Patton on agile development processes for software, and their impact on user experience professionals and designers.

"Agile development often substantially changes the way the team works. With reduced cycle times, UX members have less time to forward work to the developers and less time to evaluate the product. This means instead of designing and validating a full solution before sending it forward to development, the UX team may only design and validate just a bit -- or design some and only validate the most risky aspects of the design before development."

People accustomed to working in my native industry -- newspapers, with their daily content and production deadlines -- should find agile development practices somewhat familiar.