Agile and XP practices today need better UCD framework

There has been a lot of discussion on the Design and Programming community over the last couple of days after Jakob Nielson's article on his website. (He based them on two rounds of research : A survey with 105 respondents and a study of agile processes in 12 companies)
Link: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/agile-methods.html

While practicing UCD folks would agree to Nielson when he says ignoring the User Centered Approaches in today's Agile processes is a big risk, some agile programmers might feel that loading the process with front end UCD (in Agile terms Big Upfront Design - BUFD) is probably not the way to go.

Depending on your focus (UCD or Programming) you might either favor a more rigorous upfront process or less, as one of the premises of Agile process is YAGNI which expands to the effect of Dont Think ahead because - 'You Ain't Gonna Need It'. If you ask a User Centered Design person to choose one thing that troubled them the most to date about Agile processes, it would be the over use of 'YAGNI'. One thing people from both backgrounds would agree though, is there are gaps and it is becoming quite clear.

Nielson in his article has suggested solutions to address several of these gaps, and people like Gerard Mazoras (Agile Development Process Specialist) suggests the use of lightweight UCD techniques as the solution to address these gaps.
Link: http://concept2backlog.gerardm.com/

These are some great solutions, and the Agile projects would definitely benefit from incorporating them, but one thing that often gets overlooked and has hurt us equally, is who actually does the UCD work. If you look at resourcing of the Agile projects, you can see what I am saying. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, UCD is just one of the several hats worn by a team member and that definitely takes a toll on the quality of the UCD work that happens in the project. Now, that might look best from a resource manager's stand point because the process is essentially development centric, and there is a perception that the lightweight processes are easier to do and can be managed by a junior UX resource. That to me is an even higher risk than following a discounted UCD process itself, because knowing what methods to use, when, and how to use them become highly critical success factors when the process itself is discounted.

This is an opportunity for us in the coming days to work towards getting a process together that gets the best value out of UCD and Agile methods.

Note: There is definitely no Us versus Them here.. only Us......