Customer-Specific Teams for Agile Evolution of Large-Scale Embedded Systems

For more than a decade, agile methods have shown successful for increasing responsiveness to customer needs. Agile methods advocate close customer collaboration in the early phases of software development. However, research on how to maintain agile ways of working during software evolution is scarce. Based on a qualitative interview study, this paper explores how benefits of agile practices can be established and maintained in the evolution phase of software development. We direct our attention to large-scale software development of embedded systems where development companies struggle to meet the needs of a large customer base. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we propose customer-specific teams as a way to reap the benefits of agile methods in the evolution phase of large-scale software development. Second, we confirm the use of these teams as successful for improving customer responsiveness, customer satisfaction and feature quality during software evolution.