Using XP to develop a CRM framework

This paper describes our experiences with using XP practices within the EU-project CARUSO. The objective of CARUSO is the development of a framework for building customized Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications. Originally, the project was planned with a traditional software development process in mind with a first prototype for evaluation by the customer and a second prototype building on the results of that evaluation. However, problems occurred defining the requirements for the framework for several reasons. First, our prime customer had only a vague understanding of how the software support for their CRM needs should look like, and second, CRM involves almost every business process in a company. To address these problems we used an agile software development process that allowed us to start from a simple CRM process (customer service), dividing it into user-stories, and clarifying the requirements on the framework as the userstories were implemented.