Towards continuous validation of customer value
Paper in proceeding, 2015

While close customer collaboration is highlighted as a distinguishing characteristic in agile development, difficulties arise in large-scale agile development where the product owner can no longer represent the different needs of a large customer base. While most companies use the role of a product owner to represent the customer base, experiences show that prioritizations that are made are far from optimal. Also, once the decision to develop a feature has been taken, companies stop to continuously validate if this feature adds value to the large customer base. As experienced in the case companies we work with, re-prioritization of feature content is difficult once development has started, resulting in R&D investments in development of features that have no proven customer value. In this paper, and based on our experiences from working with five B2B software development companies, we present a conceptual model in which qualitative and quantitative customer feedback techniques allow for continuous validation and re-prioritization of feature content. In this way, large-scale software development companies can significantly improve responsiveness to customers throughout the development cycle, while at the same time increase accuracy of their development efforts.

Author

Helena Holmström Olsson

Malmö university

Jan Bosch

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

Proceeding XP '15 workshops Scientific Workshop

art. no. a3-
978-1-4503-3409-9 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

DOI

10.1145/2764979.2764982

ISBN

978-1-4503-3409-9

More information

Latest update

2/22/2018