Distributed Agile Development: A Case Study of Customer Communication Challenges

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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