Towards Customer-Centric Software Development: A Multiple-Case Study

Customer involvement in software development is essential for building successful software products. Incremental improvements and enhancements of software require an in-depth and continuous understanding of customer needs. Also, mechanisms for managing customer feedback data need to be in place. However, previous research shows that the feedback loops from customers are slow and the process for obtaining timely feedback is challenging. In this study, we investigate customer feedback mechanisms and the ways in which customer data can be used to inform continuous improvement of software products. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present a multiple-case study conducted in five Finnish software companies, where we identify how customer feedback data is collected and used in different product development activities. Second, we provide an explanatory 'customer touch point' (CTP) model which provides an overall understanding of customer feedback data collection and the related challenges in the case companies during software development.