Customer interaction in the software development process

Every aspect of business requires customers to make use of services to survive. Customer involvement is considered as one of the key factors for successful software development projects. Customers interact by giving precise requests, giving constant feedback to developers and testing each software release. Being an agile software development agency, we understand the importance of customer participation in each stage of the software development process. By looking through the key stages of an agile-based project we will see a customer’s direct impact on each part of the process.

Requirement Gathering

During this stage customer will be sharing with the team and developers, in particular, their vision for the project, expectation, and functionality. All the user requirements are gathered in user stories. This makes it easier to understand and maintain the value of the business throughout the whole development process. After all the requirements are gathered, the team moves on to the next stage and comes up with working prototypes.

Iterations conduction

By this stage, there are all the necessary materials gathered, and the problem to be solved is defined clearly. During this stage, the idea starts to be brought to life. First of all, everything has to be planned and then, again, agreed with the customer. Once agreed, developers implement all the features that were listed during the planning process. Customer will need to assess the product and initiate changes that will need to be implemented during the next step of the iteration. This process takes time since it will also require a lot of testing to be conducted. Again, without the customer’s participation, it will not be possible. Everyone needs to make sure that the customer will get working software with all the features initially requested.

Product delivery

Once all the QA (Quality Assurance) testing, internal and external training and documentation development are finished, the project finally can be released. A software product can also see a few releases before the final version. This helps the customer to see how the product will work after all the development part is finished. After every release customer needs to pay a lot of attention to the product, make sure all the requirements are included, and everything works smoothly.

Conclusion

Despite all the challenges and time-consuming processes, customer interaction in the software development process helps the development team to understand better all the needs of a customer, and deliver high-performing software. Implementation of agile methodology helps getting desired customer participation throughout the whole cycle. It also leads to a release of a decent software product, that meets all the initial requirements and has all the needed features.

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