HAVING A CUSTOMER FOCUS IN AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Abstract This research looks at the customer focus of agile software develop-ment teams. The study is part of a larger study examining how the twelve princi-ples of Beyond Budgeting1 The importance of the customer to agile software development teams operating within large organisations (Augustine, 2005, Highsmith, 2004) and to the organi-sation as a whole (Gulati, 2007, Gulati and Oldroyd, 2005) is well documented. The construct “customer focus ” has been developed by the Total Quality Man-agement (TQM) literature (Ahire et al., 1996, Sousa, 2003). Ahire et al. (1996) developed and validated a customer focus construct in the context of manufactur-ing firms. They found that quality is influenced by top management’s commitment through customer focus. Issac et al. (2004) developed a conceptual framework for TQM in software organisations which also included the customer focus construct are operationalised in the context of an agile develop-ment environment. Using two case study sites and a semi-structured interview approach the customer focus of agile teams operating within two large organisa-tions is examined. In these organisations the direct customer is not the end user of the product; rather they are another group within the organisation downstream of the agile development team. The results suggest that while organisations may es-pouse to have a customer focus the structures may not be in place to enable suffi-cient sharing of customer knowledge and utilisation of customer feedback. Emer-gent themes from the study suggest that customer identification, customer characteristics, customer location and the teams ’ experience of the customer and their domain may have an impact on the customer focus of an agile team