Facilitating an off-site customer in product-based agile software development: An industrial case study

Abstract

Software industry is increasingly using Agile Methods due to its benefits. However due to increase in companies getting global distributed teams working on a single project from various parts of the world is becoming a challenge to inline this with Agile Principles. In such cases software industry has adapted Agile methods according to their particular needs. This adaptive arrangement is found to be divergent to basic Agile Principles. Customer collocation is one of the basic motivations and focus of Agile but under certain conditions as proved by the case study explained in this paper it does not impact success of projects. This paper is a detailed study of a software development organization following SCRUM for developing software products of its own. However after initial development they develop tailored products on customers' indentation. The study shows factors and impacts of successful surge of product even with absence of real customer throughout the customized product development. It is concluded that prior experience with same domain alternate customer representations, effective communications within team mitigates the effects of no onsite customer. On basis of the findings a framework is introduced which combines the success oriented factors. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.