Customer Collaboration in Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Context: Customer collaboration in software development – an industrial perspective. Objective: To gather an understanding of customer collaboration advantages and disadvantages, problems faced by different organizations when engaging customer collaboration and investigate the processes, tools, guidelines proposed by relevant empirical publications. Method: Systematic literature review following the Guidelines for Performing Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering Results: A total of 51 relevant published studies were selected for this study from 6 science and engineering databases. The most discussed challenges of customer collaboration are the lack of stakeholders’ commitment, work domain misunderstandings and the lack of methods and processes for collaboration. The most suggested types of solutions are effective and realtime communication tools that help avoid misunderstandings, user group techniques such as meeting and workshops, and user feedback. The most common advantages of customer collaboration are understanding improvement and quick feedback. The most investigated disadvantages of customer collaboration are the reduced in project efficiency and the development of unrealistic expectations towards project roles and the final product. Conclusion: To be able to gain more advantages from customer collaboration and becoming vulnerable to its disadvantages, a software company should manage the challenges it raises with appropriate solutions.