Managing Customer Involvement in Globally Distributed Agile Projects

Agile software projects require frequent interactions between customer and team members especially during requirements analysis and acceptance testing. Though these phases normally require customer availability on-site, this type of involvement might be difficult with globally distributed projects where customer's location is different from team members' location. The traditional methods of customer involvement in distributed agile projects such as using the rich communication technologies (e.g. video-conferencing solutions) are commonly used. The problem with these methods is that team members may not recognize how their technical work requires customer involvement. Even if they know, they might forget to inform the customer or there might be a considerable time between the need for customer involvement and the nearest meeting with him. In addition, the review of the available mechanisms of customer support in thirty-six project management tools reveals a lack of computer-based support for customer involvement. This paper presents a research in-progress which aims to support the effective management of customer involvement in distributed agile teams. It proposes computer-based process support for managing customer involvement which can improve the meaningful communication between customer and agile team and improve customers' awareness with regard to the state of activities in which he participates in.