Jens Coldewey, Coldewey Consulting
Mary Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC
Klaus Marquardt, Draeger Medical AG 

One of the values of agile methodologies is to satisfy the customer through frequent delivery of working, useful software. The claim is that agile projects yield better customer satisfaction than traditional processes.

However, the customer role in agile methodologies is often perceived to be nebulous. There are hints, such as the regular Sprint Meeting in Scrum or the Customer on Site in XP, but more questions are raised than answered: Are customer and client the same? Are there any assumptions about the corporate culture of the client? Are there any restrictions on the legal construction of the client-vendor-relationship? Is the customer one person or a team? And so on.

This workshop aimed at exploring the customer role further in a highly interactive setting. It looked for different perspectives on the topic from the participants experience and tries to deepen the understanding of this important issue.

Contents and Objectives

Though the customer is the main target of all agile methodologies, his or her role is surprisingly fuzzy in agile methodologies. There is some work going on currently to fill this gap, such as an evolving pattern language on the customer role in XP or a proposal for an IEEE standard, but these are in early stages and thus far from generally answering one of the major questions of agile development: What role does the client play in agile projects and are there specific practices or strategies that help an organization to establish a fruitful customer relationship? 

This workshop aimed at discussing these issues and getting additional insights into the client role of agile projects.  

Attendees (Click on name to see submitted position paper.)

Jennitta Andrea
Robert Biddle
Jens Coldewey
Richard P. Gabriel
Klaus Marquardt
Brian Marick
Barb Miller
Jeff Patton
Mary Poppendieck
Tom Poppendieck
Dan Rawsthorne
Barbara Weber
Werner Wild

Results:  Poster Session (Click on session title to see poster.)

The workshop attendees produced three posters for the OOPSLA poster session.  Here they are:

1.  The Agile Customer Can...
2.  Products vs. Projects
3.  Nickieben Bourbaki Is a Customer on an Agile Project. Boy, does he have problems…

About the Organizers

Jens Coldewey is an independent consultant from Munich, Germany, specialized in deploying object-oriented techniques and agile development in large organizations. He was program chair of the EuroPLoP’98 conference, member of the program committee of the PLoP ’98,PLoP’99, EuroPLoP’99, XP 2002 - 2003, Agile Development Conference 2003, OOPSLA 2003 and2004 conferences. He was co-organizer of a serious of workshops in past OOPSLAs, including the "Human Issues of Agile Processes" workshop at OOPSLA 2001 and the „Commonalities of Agile Methodologies“ workshop at OOPSLA 2002. He is board member of the Agile Alliance Non-Profit Organization and writes a regular column on Agile Development in ObjektSpektrum, the German SIGS/101 magazine on OOKlaus

Klaus Marquardt is a lead software architect at Dräger Medical in Lübeck, Germany. His published work covers modular, extensible software and system architectures, agile values in large organizations, and the working attitude of software architects. Klaus has co-organized various workshops at previous OOPSLA conferences on agile development and software architecture, and contributed to other conferences including EuroPLoP, OOP (Germany), OT (UK), VikingPLoP, and JAOO (Denmark). He is program chair of EuroPLoP 2004.

Mary Poppendieck a Cutter Consortium Consultant, is a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development with more than 25 years' of IT experience. She has led teams implementing lean solutions ranging from enterprise supply chain management to digital media, and built one of 3M's first Just-in-Time lean production systems. Mary is currently the President of Poppendieck LLC and located in Minnesota. Her book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, which brings lean production techniques to software development won the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004.