Empirical Research on Customer Communication Challenges in the Companies Adopting Agile Practices

One of the most critical aspects of Software Development Process is the Requirements Engineering process and defining the correct and understandable requirements in Agile methodology. Hence, Requirements Engineering in agile directly effect the overall project success. This paper demonstrates a research study about the usage of Agile methods in the set of industrial companies located in Russia. The survey gives insights about different aspects of the method: communication challenges and issues arising during the Software Requirements Engineering phase in particular the challenges in the communication with the customers. To investigate these issues the paper presents an analysis of the state of the art done with the help of the research survey. The results of the interview sessions are summarized and the set of suggestions to overcome the challenges are proposed. 30 representatives from 20 different companies who are mainly Product owners and Product Managers participated in the surve y. As the results indicate, the communication is always a key challenge for the companies. The analysis of particular qualities of the communication field in the context of rapidly changing Software Development environment helped to define the outcomes related to the customer communication