Developer and Customer Collaboration in Agile Software Development

The contribution of this thesis is an in-field verification that Agile software development projects are prone to developer and customer collaboration problems. The focus of collaboration in Agile projects is a trending topic in literature, but there are still limited studies regarding stakeholder collaboration problems. This thesis is a research on the causes and consequences of collaboration problems between developers and customers in Agile software development projects. In addition, the thesis studies the contingency strategies that developers use to avoid collaboration problems with the customer. Empirical data was collected through interviews with the Norwegian software consultant company Bouvet, regarding their project with a governmental customer. Firstly, findings suggest that lack of time commitment and governmental issues was the core cause of collaboration problems. Secondly, the consequences of these collaboration problems were shown to be especially low-value deliveries from the developers and problems in securing feedback from the customer. Thirdly, it was found that developers used numerous strategies, including e-collaboration, to deal with collaboration problems with the customer. Overall, the customer had few signs of scepticism towards Agile, which has been indicated as a problem in previous literature. Even though Bouvet and their governmental customer show signs of close and trustworthy collaboration, the development team shows signs of deviations from key Agile principles. More studies on Agile projects, including different types of case projects and case companies, are recommended to enable more depth