Agile processes enhancing user participation for small providers of off-the-shelf software

Abstract

To survive in today’s competitive software market, software developers must maintain contact with their customers and users and adopt a flexible organization which allows response to feedback and the changing requirements from the use-context. This also requires a software development that enables change proposals and error reports to be acted upon quickly. The present article uses a case study of a flexible development practice which so far has proved to be sustainable and successful to reconsider user involvement and software development practices of small software providers from an agile perspective. Implementing an agile process may allow for competitive flexibility without necessarily jeopardizing quality.