Abstract
Companies serving multiple customers or a segmented mass market often struggle with two conflicting forces. On the one hand, companies need to deploy a constant stream of new features to their customer base. On the other hand, individual customers demand rapid feedback to their request for dedicated functionality. Although the conflict of achieving scale and at the same time staying responsive to individual customers has been recognized by others, it is particularly challenging in large-scale software development. In this paper, we study the concept of customer-specific teams (CSTs) as an answer to this challenge. The CST notion builds upon agile values and is an effective means to shorten feedback loops and increase customer responsiveness, customer satisfaction, and feature quality. Also, the approach allows for more innovative feature development bringing with it new business opportunities in a market where competition is fierce. We illustrate and validate the approach in the context of one of the business units of Ericsson.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Larman, C., Vodde, B.: Scaling Lean and Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum. Pearson Education Inc., Boston (2009)
Highsmith, J., Cockburn, A.: Agile software development: the business of innovation. Softw. Manag. 34(9), 120–122 (2001)
Abrahamsson, P., Warsta, J., Siponen, M., Ronkainen, J.: New directions on Agile methods: A comparative analysis. In: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 244–254. Springer, Portland (2003)
Olsson, H.H., Alahyari, H., Bosch, J.: Climbing the “Stairway to Heaven”: A multiple-case study exploring barriers in the transition from agile development towards continuous deployment of software. In: Proceedings of the 38th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, IEEE, Cesme, 5–7 September 2012
Kerievsky, J.: Industrial XP: Making XP work in large organizations. Executive report in Agile Project Management, vol. 6, no. 2
McMahon, P.E.: Extending agile methods: A distributed project and organizational improvement perspective. In: Proceedings of the 17th Annual Systems and Software Technology Conference, Salt Lake City, 18–21 April 2005
Lagerberg, L., Skude, T., Emanuelsson, P., Sandahl, K., Stahl, D.: The impact of agile principles and practices on large-scale software development projects: a multiple-case study of two projects at Ericsson. In: ESEM, 2013 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), pp. 348–356 (2013). doi:10.1109/ESEM.2013.53
Heikkilä, V., Paasivaara, M., Lassenius, C., Engblom, C.: Continuous release planning in a large-scale scrum development organization at Ericsson. In: Baumeister, H., Weber, B. (eds.) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, vol. 149, pp. 195–209. Springer, Berlin (2013)
Badampudi, D., Fricker, S., Moreno, A.: Perspectives on productivity and delays in large-scale Agile projects. In: Baumeister, H., Weber, B. (eds.) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, vol. 149, pp. 180–194. Springer, Berlin (2013)
Bosch, J.: Maturity and evolution in software product lines: Approaches, artefacts and organization. In: Proceedings of the Second Software Product Line Conference (SPLC2), pp. 257–271, Springer-Verlag London, UK (2002). ISBN:3-540-43985-4
Arnett, D.B., Badrinarayanan, V.: Enhancinf customer needs-driven CRM strategies: core selling teams, knowledge management competence and relationship marketing competence. J. Pers. Sell. Sales Manag. 25(4), 1015–1024 (2005)
Chalmeta, R.: Methodology for customer relationship management. J. Syst. Softw. 79(7), 1015–1024 (2006)
Rathnam, S., Mahajan, V., Whinston, A.B.: Facilitating coordination in customer support teams: a framework and its implications for the design of information technology. Manag. Sci. 41(12), 1900–1921 (1995)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Olsson, H.H., Sandberg, A.B., Bosch, J. (2014). Customer-Specific Teams for Agile Evolution of Large-Scale Embedded Systems. In: Bosch, J. (eds) Continuous Software Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11283-1_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11283-1_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11282-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11283-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)