Supporting Remote Customer Involvement in Distributed Agile Development: A Coordination Approach

The expansion of software development industry has led to having team members distributed across different geographical areas. While using agile development by distributed teams has many benefits, it raises many challenges and difficulties as well. Managing remote customer involvement is one of the difficulties faced by distributed agile teams. This article aims to 1) identify the key activity dependencies existing during remote customer involvement in distributed agile development, and 2) design a computer-based system capable of providing coordination support through managing these dependencies. In order to achieve these objectives, two case studies are carried out. Our findings revealed 16 dependencies existing in seven types of activity. In addition, the participatory design approach used in the design shows that a computer-based system to manage the dependencies is capable to manage 14 dependencies existing in five types of activity. This article contributes to understanding the inter-relationships between customer and agile teams and contributes also to developing advanced systems supporting remote customer involvement in distributed agile development.