An Inside View into the Role of Customer in Agile Methods

Abstract

The successful software product demands various factors to play their part. One of the important factors is the successful role played by the stakeholders of the software domain. Extreme programming (XP) is one of the famous agile software development methods which advocates for the role of onsite customer who actively participates in team and remains onsite with a team physically. This paper presents the survey study of the role of onsite customer in XP and critically analyzes how this role is being carried-out practically in agile methods, particularly in XP. The data was collected from XP series conference from XP 2005 till XP 2010 as well as agile series conference from agile 2005 till 2010. The result shows that the role of the customer is being played both as onsite as well as offsite with team. However, few teams have no customer role at all. The communication channels used mostly between the customer and the team are: face-to-face, email, video conference, phone call, wiki, instant messaging, requirement document, online conference, presentation, dictionary, and story cards.