Conduct User Research before the (Agile) development work?

An important descision when merging UCD with Agile development is if you do Interaction Design before or during the sprints. 

Agile methods like Scrum propose that a multi-disciplinary team is formed from the start and that all disciplines work together on the functionality (or better, value) to be delivered. A team of 5-9 people can consist of any combination of developers, business analysts, testers, graphic designers etc…? You could add user experience roles to the team. Usability experts/testers, Interaction designers, Information Architects, etc. If the goal is to deliver ‘potentially shippable code’ in each sprint then the developers on the teams have to start coding from day one. They may be working on a Proof of Concept but there must be something to research, code or set up. Does this buy the interaction designers enough time to do the required field research? Maybe not.

User Research needs to happen before development work concludes Richard Cecil in his (2006) article on UXmatters on Agile and UCD.

User research and agile do not play well together. The time to conduct field research is not during development. Research should occurbefore any design or development work begins. This may seem obvious, but is an extremely important point—especially when you consider that agile development is about writing code as early as possible and delivering working software as often as possible. Conducting user research slows things down. However—and I’m probably preaching to the choir here—user research provides insights into customers and their needs that will help a product team to identify useful new features and products as well as to prioritize those features and products for development.

UCD proposes to analyse user goals and behaviors before starting development. You may want to be very sure about the desired functionality of your product before you ramp up a full development team. Understanding the needs of (potential) users is key for designing the right product. It may even influence the descision if you want to go ahead developing a product at all or the shape it may take.

Therefore you can make a case that Interaction Design Research at least partly needs to happen before the development team starts building. 

This may clash with the Agile notion that big requirements research up front is a bad idea. Or could we see the people doing interaction design research as a support group for the Product Owner? Based on findings in the field with the target audience they could help the Product Owner shape a good product backlog.

Food for thought… I need to find out how different companies are doing this. Any ideas?