Agile wasn’t born with a clear place to fit user-centered design, but integrating usability seems to come down to a couple of strategies:

• Adding a planning stage to the beginning of the project to figure out what the team is going to build
• The usability person/people work on planning the UI for the next iteration while reviewing the previous iteration

Flexibility is also key, although I would suggest that any usability professional that wishes to stick to rigid structures is living in some kind of fantasy land.

My joking complaint about the meeting is that the panelists disagreed with each other too much. Perhaps that’s why I should never be invited to join a panel – I’d want to cause a disagreement just to make things more interesting. However, the audience was very engaged, despite the alignment of the panelists.