Views from an Organization on How Agile Development Affects Its Collaboration with a Software Development Team

The purpose of this study is to investigate how agile development affects collaboration in an organization. Agile processes have received interest from the software development community during the last years as they address changes, such as new customer requirements or re-prioritization of development tasks, which is important to manage in software development. Most of the research published about agile processes are based on opinions from teams applying these processes. However, since software development is an activity where many parties often collaborate, it is interesting to investigate from an organizational point of view, how agile development affects collaboration between these teams and their organizations. An agile process based on extreme programming, XP, was applied by a team during eight months. The team interacted with its surrounding organization regularly. People from the organization which the team collaborated with were interviewed to understand how the use of the process affected their collaboration with the team. The results show that the interviewed people perceived an improvement of their collaboration with the team, as the team started develop software in an agile way.