Customer relationships and Extreme Programming

ABSTRACT

Extreme Programming (XP) brings the customer and development team together into a tight functional unit, while eliminating many of the process activities of more structured software development processes. While agile methods may yield benefits in terms of product cost and quality, there is also a risk that the very practices that make agile methods effective may weaken the customer relationship. This paper examines XP from the perspective of customer satisfaction and motivates the need for more analysis of the social, psychological, and business factors in studies of software development methods.

REFERENCES

• 1: Agile Alliance. Manifesto for Agile Software Development. http://www.agilemanifesto.org, 2001.
• 2: Anderson, E. W. and Sullivan, M. W. The Antecedents and Consequences of Customer Satisfaction for Firms. Marketing Science, 12, 2 (Spring, 1993), 125--143.
• 3: Kent Beck, Embracing Change with Extreme Programming, Computer, v.32 n.10, p.70-77, October 1999 [doi>10.1109/2.796139]
• 4: Kent Beck, Extreme programming explained: embrace change, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 5: Brown, S. W. and Swartz, T. A. A Gap Analysis of Professional Service Quality. Journal of Marketing, 53, 2 (April, 1989), 92--98.
• 6: The "C3 Team". Chrysler Goes to "Extremes". Distributed Computing, October 1998, 24--26.
• 7: Lan Cao , Peng Xu, Activity Patterns of Pair Programming, Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 3, p.88.1, January 03-06, 2005 [doi>10.1109/HICSS.2005.66]
• 8: Amr Elssamadisy , Gregory Schalliol, Recognizing and responding to "bad smells" in extreme programming, Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 19-25, 2002, Orlando, Florida [doi>10.1145/581339.581418]
• 9: Goodman, P. S., Fichman, M., Lerch, F. J., and Snyder, P. R. Customer-Firm Relationships, Involvement, and Customer Satisfaction. The Academy of Management Journal, 38, 5 (Oct. 1995), 1310--1324.
• 10: Talha Javed , Manzil e Maqsood , Qaiser S. Durrani, A study to investigate the impact of requirements instability on software defects, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.29 n.3, May 2004 [doi>10.1145/986710.986727]
• 11: Koskela, J. and Abrahamsson, P. On-Site Customer in an XP Project: Empirical Results from a Case Study. In Proceedings 11th European Conference on Software Process Improvements (EuroSPI 2004) (Trondheim, Norway, November 10-12, 2004), 1--11.
• 12: Lengnick-Hall, C. A. Customer Contributions to Quality: A Different View of the Customer-Oriented Firm. The Academy of Management Review, 21, 3 (July 1996), 791--824.
• 13: Alan MacCormack , Roberto Verganti , Marco Iansiti, Developing Products on "Internet Time": The Anatomy of a Flexible Development Process, Management Science, v.47 n.1, p.133-150, January 2001 [doi>10.1287/mnsc.47.1.133.10663]
• 14: Francisco Macias , Mike Holcombe , Marian Gheorghe, A Formal Experiment Comparing Extreme Programming with Traditional Software Construction, Proceedings of the 4th Mexican International Conference on Computer Science, p.73, September 08-12, 2003
• 15: Martin, A., Noble, J., and Biddle, R. Being Jane Malkovich: A Look Into the World of an XP Customer. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on eXtreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering (XP2003) (Genova, Italy, May 25--29, 2003), 234--243.
• 16: Mills, P. K., Chase, R. B., and Marguilies, N. Motivating the Client/Employee System as a Service Production Strategy. The Academy of Management Review, 8, 2 (April, 1983), 301--310.
• 17: Matthias M. Muller , Frank Padberg, An Empirical Study about the Feelgood Factor in Pair Programming, Proceedings of the Software Metrics, 10th International Symposium on (METRICS'04), p.151-158, September 11-17, 2004 [doi>10.1109/METRICS.2004.8]
• 18: Orlando Murru , Roberto Deias , Giampiero Mugheddu, Assessing XP at a European Internet Company, IEEE Software, v.20 n.3, p.37-43, May 2003 [doi>10.1109/MS.2003.1196318]
• 19: Mary Poppendieck , Tom Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2003
• 20: Charles Poole , Jan Willem Huisman, Using Extreme Programming in a Maintenance Environment, IEEE Software, v.18 n.6, p.42-50, November 2001 [doi>10.1109/52.965801]
• 21: Rumpe, B., and Schröder, A. Quantitative Survey on Extreme Programming Projects. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Extreme Programming and Flexible Processes in Software Engineering (XP2002) (Alghero, Italy, May 26--30 2002), 95--100.
• 22: Matthew Stephens , Doug Rosenberg, Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP, APress L. P., 2003
• 23: William A. Wood , William L. Kleb, Exploring XP for Scientific Research, IEEE Software, v.20 n.3, p.30-36, May 2003 [doi>10.1109/MS.2003.1196317]
• 24: Didar Zowghi , N Nurmuliani, A Study of the Impact of Requirements Volatility on Software Project Performance, Proceedings of the Ninth Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, p.3, December 04-06, 2002

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.9 Management
          Subjects: Software process models (e.g., CMM, ISO, PSP)

General Terms:
Human Factors, Management, Measurement

Keywords:
agile methods, business value, customer relationships, customer satisfaction, extreme programming, quality