My Friend the Customer

Abstract

Your customer must speak with one voice … if that is not the case you will suffer Chet Hendrickson [2]. The Customer is the only non-developer role in eXtreme Programming (XP). The Customer’s explicit responsibilities are to drive the project, providing project requirements (user stories) and quality control (acceptance testing). Unfortunately the customer must also shoulder a number of implicit responsibilities including liaison with external project stakeholders, especially project funders, clients, and end users, while maintaining the trust of both the development team and the wider business. In this paper, we provide a small collection of patterns that that describe useful models for the customer, showing how other roles involved in the process can be adapted to also serve as the XP customer