Customer-Specific Teams for Agile Software Evolution

Abstract—For more than a decade, agile methods have shown successful for increasing responsiveness to customer needs. As a major characteristic, agile methods advocate close customer collaboration in the early phases of software development. However, research on how to maintain agile ways of working during software evolution is scarce. In this paper, we address the need to establish and maintain agile ways of working during software evolution. We direct our attention to large-scale software development where development companies struggle to meet the needs of a large customer base. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we propose customer-specific teams as a way to reap the benefits of agile methods in the evolution phase of large-scale software development. Second, we confirm the use of these teams as successful for improving customer responsiveness, customer satisfaction and feature quality in the subsequent phases of software evolution. Keywords-agile methods, large-scale software development, software evolution, customer-specific teams I