Distributed Agile Development: A Case Study of Customer Communication Challenges (original) (raw)

Abstract

The highly collaborative nature of software development emphasizes the importance of efficient communication. Agile methodologies further accentuate its importance. The importance of communication is further exacerbated in distributed environments due to temporal, geographical and cultural distances. Despite this, little is known about communication in distributed agile development. This results from the case study described in this paper suggest that the efficiency of customer communication is dependent on the nature of the actual customer relationship and the organizational policies. Weak customer relationship and deliberate information hiding may result in inefficient communication and reduced efficiency of the communication media. Thus, in order to enable meaningful communication, establishing an efficient customer relationship can be considered paramount.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, P.O.Box 1100, FIN-90571, Oulu, Finland
    Mikko Korkala & Minna Pikkarainen
  2. National University of Ireland Galway, Newcastle Rd., Galway, Ireland
    Kieran Conboy

Authors

  1. Mikko Korkala
  2. Minna Pikkarainen
  3. Kieran Conboy

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, P.O.Box 68, 00014, Helsinki, Finland
    Pekka Abrahamsson
  2. DIEE Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy
    Michele Marchesi
  3. Agile Software Engineering/e-Business Engineering (ase/ebe) group, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
    Frank Maurer

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Korkala, M., Pikkarainen, M., Conboy, K. (2009). Distributed Agile Development: A Case Study of Customer Communication Challenges. In: Abrahamsson, P., Marchesi, M., Maurer, F. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2009. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 31. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01853-4\_21

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