Customer collaboration: successes and challenges in practice Report of an activity session held at XP 2003

This paper reports on an activity session held at XP2003 in Genoa, Italy in May 2003. The intention of the session was to collect experience of customer collaboration in XP projects with the intention of identifying common models, their critical success factors and their pitfalls. As reported in the books, XP expects an on-site customer, i.e. someone co-located with the development team who is able to make decisions about required functionality and funding while at the same time representing the real users of the product. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that this model is not widely used, and the results of this session confirm that there are many different successful models used in practice. 1. Background The Agile manifesto emphasises the importance of valuing "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation". An overview of requirements is expected at the beginning of an agile project, but the principle of collaborative partnerships between developers and customers underpins the process of negotiation required to expand the requirements and manage constant change. In XP, this principle is instantiated through the practice of having an 'on-site customer', someone who is available to answer questions, resolve disputes and set small-scale priorities on an on-going basis (Beck, 2000). Thi