Customer Engagement in Agile Sofware Development

Abstract

Agile methods promise an ideal approach to customer involvement. However, the success relies on having a full-time dedicated, on-site customer representative working in closecollaboration with the developers throughout all phases of the project in order to provide the team with ongoing domain expertize. For many projects, providing this form of customer involvement is infeasible. Organizations are therefore left with finding a more viable way of practicing customer involvementThrough a case study of medium-sized, multi-national organization, practicing agile software development with off-site customer representatives, I illuminated the challenges emerging from this situation. By providing a framework for practitioners, I present my suggestions on how to decided on the right customer representative, and what support functions that needs to be established in order for the customer involvement to be successful.