Experimental evaluation of 'on-site customer' XP practice on quality of software and team effectiveness

Abstract

Extreme Programming (XP) is an agile software production methodology based on organizational foundations collected in so-called practices. One of them: On-site Customer is focused on frequent and intensive involvement of customer representative in software creation process. It is said that no one knows customer's business and its specific needs better than the customer himself. However, it is hard to argue whether On-site Customer practice brings positive results on quality of software and effort effectiveness without experimental evaluation of the procedure. In order to provide assessment of the influence how On-site Customer affects quality of produced software and effectiveness of software team we performed an experiment where six software teams worked in parallel having an on-site customer while the other seven teams could only contact their customer representative by telephone or email. Results collected in the paper provide a description of experiment based on extended version of educational game eXtreme89 as well as results collected in experiment and analysis of quality of software produced by teams working according to different software creation paradigms. Data gained during the experiment confirmed that On-site Customer practice has substantial positive influence on quality of communication and speed of software production. Experimental results gave us quantitative assessment in discussion on effectiveness of this software production XP practice. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.