A CONTEXTUAL FRAMEWORK SUPPORTING COLLABORATION BETWEEN CUSTOMERS AND DEVELOPERS IN DISTRIBUTED, AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Distributed software development has notable advantages over a traditional, in-house development process, such as lower costs and higher productivity; however, it also presents several drawbacks mainly due to geographical, temporal and socio-cultural distances between stakeholders, that can affect communication, coordination and control activities, making collaboration difficult and ultimately leading to failure. Agile methodologies, which are particularly focused on such activities, could raise concerns when applied in a distributed development setting. In this paper, we discuss issues related to communication, coordination and control between customers and developers in a distributed, Agile setting, as derived from recent research. The main contribution of the paper is a framework that targets such issues, featuring a set of practices and tools for handling in an integrated way contextual and project management information as well as formal and informal communication activities.