Abstract
Previous empirical studies have demonstrated the relevance of the concept of customer value to the software industry and the state-of-the-art of strategies to increase customer value in Agile Software Development (ASD) has been recently documented in a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). However, to date, there are no studies on the state of practice for this area focusing on issues similar to those investigated in the SLRs mentioned above. The objective of this article was to report on the state of the practice of adopting strategies to increase customer value in the ASD and to detail these strategies concerning goals pursued, customer value metrics, challenges and usage impacts, and the reasons for non-adoption. A survey was performed using a web questionnaire answered by software professionals who are members of agile teams. Data were collected from 378 respondents from 123 Brazilian software intensive organizations. Prioritizing the development of high-value customer features and validating them frequently (92.3%), as well as focusing on value aspects of the client’s market segment and applying the most relevant agile practices to make them viable (64.8%), appeared to be the strategies most frequently practiced by agile teams. Generally, the experiences of using these strategies appear to be very positive, although challenges have also been identified, such as defining what customer value and customer collaboration is.
Highlights
One of the critical characteristic of Agile Software Development (ASD) is its explicit focus on customer value (Conboy, 2009)
Other organizations can harness the results through a better understanding of the strategies that their peers are using, the main objectives to adopt them, as well as their benefits and challenges; II) it presents the first large-scale exploratory study analyzing the state of the practice on strategies to increase the value for the client in agile software development; III) the results of this study provide the basis for future research, identifying the most commonly used customer value strategies and metrics, as well as the most frequently obtained benefits and usage challenges
The results indicated that around 89% of the agile teams represented in this study had implemented strategies to maximize customer value
Summary
One of the critical characteristic of Agile Software Development (ASD) is its explicit focus on customer value (Conboy, 2009). The concept of customer value takes into account the perspective of a company’s customers, whether internal or external, considering what they want and believe by the purchase or use of a product or service (Khalifa, 2004). This concept is referred to in the literature as complex, difficult to understand, conceptualize and model (Andreu et al, 2010). It is challenging to estimate and calculate the value of the software (Racheva, Daneva, Sikkel and Buglione, 2010; Sambinelli and Borges, 2019a) It is not merely a matter of the absence of defects. It is possible to deliver software without defects, but with little or no value for the client (Gilb, 2017)
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