Customer Involvement In a Software Product Line

1
Customer InvolvementIn a Software Product Line

• Arie van Deursen
• 21 May 2001

http//www.cwi.nl/arie/
2
Background

• Cobol program understanding tools
• Major customer 50,000,000 lines of code
• Immediate redocumentation after change.
• Product / customer development
• Initial development academic prototype
• Startup (April 2000).
• First XP project.
• 8 people involved.

3
Who is the Customer

• Upper management / organizational change
• Installation / deployment
• End users
• original Cobol developers, maintenance
  programmers, project management doing impact
  analysis, QA,
• Developers using API for building apps
• Marketing, selling the product.

4
Selling Involvement

• On site customer is too expensive?
• Most valuable XP customer valuable
  employee as well.
• Management wants to buy whole solution, why
  involvement necessary?
• XP provides a customer interface -- can it be
  implemented?

5
Innovation

• Installing software change in work
• Resistance
• Semantic gap between developers and customers
• Developers dont consider talking to the customer
  as their real job.
• (On site customer innovator)

6
Politics
2nd law of cons. No matter how it looks at
first, its always a people problem.

• XP requires open communication
• Hidden agendas / History
• Short term / long term staff
• Changing your mind
• Development needs to be motivated -- this
  requires consistency of the stories.
• People change / software stays.

7
Solutions?

• Developers play the customer
• Rotating customer per user story
• Developer involvement?
• Explicit account management
• Literature?