Treffer: Customer-Developer Links in Software Development.

This article focuses on the significance of customer-developer links in software development. To summarize briefly, the contribution of this study was to introduce the notion that customer participation in software development requires the selection of one or more customer-developer links through which information can be exchanged. As an initial step toward understanding link selection and use, an exploratory study of 31 software development projects was undertaken to determine the perceived effectiveness of various links and the extent to which they are used in practice. Three lessons can be drawn based on the results of the study. First, using the link metric for customer participation, we found that more successful projects employed more links than did less successful projects. Hence, the first lesson is that managers should err on the side of providing more links. Second, we observed an abundance of indirect links among many of the projects in our sample. The indirect links were visible in the form of intermediaries and/or customer surrogates that manifested themselves in a variety of different ways. We argue that indirect links are less desirable to use because of information filtering and distortion that can occur. Consequently, our second lesson calls for reduced reliance on indirect links. Taken together, the first two lessons underscore the notion that developers are best served by establishing numerous direct links through which information can be exchanged between developers and customers to enhance their mutual understanding. This exchange of information cannot take place when the number of links is small or when the channels are distorted by intermediaries.