The role of the customer in software development

The impact of inadequate customer collaboration on self-organizing Agile teams

“…Agile projects expand the role of the customer in software development by involving them in writing user stories, discussing product features, prioritizing the feature lists, and providing rapid feedback to the development team on a regular basis [11,1,9,4]. The level of customer involvement that Agile demands is higher than their involvement in traditional projects: Lack of customer involved was seen as ''the most difficult part of Agile'' and ''the biggest problem'' because ''Agile [requires] fairly strong customer involvement'' (P4, P17, P30).…”

“…In contrast, customer collaboration is a vital feature and an important success factor in Agile software development [5][6][7][8][9][10]. Agile methods expand the customer role within the entire development process by involving them in writing user stories, discussing product features, prioritizing the feature lists, and providing rapid feedback to the development team on a regular basis [1,4,9,11]. But are customers on real-life Agile projects involved in their projects to the extent Agile methods demand?…”

Agile Undercover: When Customers Don’t Collaborate

“…The customer rep is ideally an individual who has both thorough understanding of and ability to express the project requirements and the authority to take strategic decisions [9,15,27]. Boehm advocates dedicated and co-located CRACK (Collaborative, Responsible, Authorized, Committed, Knowledgeable) customers for Agile projects [4].…”

“…In contrast, customer collaboration is a vital feature and an important success factor in Agile software development [5,8,17,18,25,26,27]. Agile methods expand the customer role within the entire development process by involving them in writing user stories, discussing product features, prioritizing the feature lists, and providing rapid feedback to the development team on a regular basis [9,15,25,27].…”

Challenges of Gathering User Requirement in eXtreme Programming Project: A Case Study of Highway Construction Monitoring System

“…Therefore, it is important to bridge the gap between both developer and customer through good relationship. There is research that introduce some recommendation for effectiveness of relationship between customers and developers like "It's a relationship not sale", "customer understanding", "trust account", "aware boundaries", "timely response" and so on [21]. Therefore to overcome the problem a training that involved the customer and the developer and focused on the involvement of customer especially in gathering user requirement had been done [22].…”