Customer and user involvement in agile software development

Abstract

Studies of user involvement in agile development are very scarce. We provide a case study of how user involvement took place in a large agile project, which utilized the agile method eXtreme Programming. Planning games, user stories and story cards, working software and acceptance tests structured the user involvement. We found genuine customer and user involvement in the form of direct and indirect participation in the project. The involved customer representatives played informative, consultative and participative roles in the project. This lead to their functional empowerment i.e. the users were enabled to carry out their work to their own satisfaction and in an effective, efficient and economical manner. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.