Improving communication between customers and developers

Reducing waste and building a system based on the right requirements are key benefits of agile methods. Agile delivers on this promise thanks to constant business user involvement with developers, and frequent checkpoints of working software to encourage a tight feedback loop between the developers and the end users. Through exposure to complex business problems that our clients present us, however, we have found situations where these traditional agile approaches have left us unprepared. In many cases, our clients simply cannot continuously work with us because of the nature of their business. In others, the complexity of the business problem is such that producing working code takes significantly longer than we would like. In both cases, we still need to make sure business people communicate well with developers, so that we can build the best system possible for our clients. In the context of an actual case study involving a system developed for the US military, we present a sampling of techniques we have developed to address these tough but not uncommon situations.