Customer Validation, Feedback and Collaboration in Large-Scale Continuous Software Development

Abstract: The importance of continuously incorporating customer feedback in the software development process is well established and firmly grounded in concepts such as agile and DevOps. In large-scale organizations such as Dell Technologies however, an array of challenges remain unsolved relating to this crucial aspect of software development. Despite a wide variety of tools and techniques available for collecting and analyzing customer feedback, in large-scale organizations implementing agile and continuous software development practices, harmful disconnects, discrepancies and processes exist. Such challenges negatively impact on an organizations ability to regularly deploy incremental improvements to their software products which meet customer needs. In this Professional Doctorate research program, wherein the researcher is a practitioner within Dell Technologies, we explore the challenges of continuously integrating customer feedback in a large scale global organization with over 100,000 employees and hundreds of software products. Leveraging an Action Research approach, we will propose a model to enhance the continuous incorporation of customer feedback and validation, providing organizations with the ability to frequently deliver incremental software improvements which satisfy the needs of its customers, measurable by metrics such as customer satisfaction, product adoption, bugs/defect escapes, production incidents and deployment frequency.