Combining Agile and Traditional: Customer Communication in Distributed Environment

Distributed development is a radically increasing phenomenon in modern software development environments. At the same time, traditional and agile methodologies and combinations of those are being used in the industry. Agile approaches place a large emphasis on customer communication. However, existing knowledge on customer communication in distributed agile development seems to be lacking. In order to shed light on this topic and provide practical guidelines for companies in distributed agile environments, a qualitative case study was conducted in a large globally distributed software company. The key finding was that it might be difficult for an agile organization to get relevant information from a traditional type of customer organization, even though the customer communication was indicated to be active and utilized via multiple different communication media. Several challenges discussed in this paper referred to information blackout indicating the importance of an environment fostering meaningful communication. In order to evaluate if this environment can be created a set of guidelines is proposed.