Introducing agile customer-centered development in a legacy software product line

Journal article, 2011

The ability to rapidly respond to customer interest and to effectively prioritize development effort has been a long-standing challenge for mass-market software intensive products. This problem is exacerbated in the context of software product lines as functionality may easily fall over software asset and organizational boundaries with consequent losses in efficiency and nimbleness. Some companies facing these problems in their product line respond with a new development process. In this paper we discuss the developments within a single case study, Intuit’s Quickbooks product line that combined agile software development, design thinking and self-organizing teams in a successful approach, which provided a significant improvement in terms of responsiveness and accuracy of building customer value.