Outside-in Software Development: A Practical Approach to Building Successful Stakeholder-based Products

Acknowledgments

Both of the authors work for the IBM Corporation, where we’ve been using outside-in development approaches for many years across a wide range of products. We’ve been quite fortunate in that our seniormost leaders tend to be so heavily client-driven that outside-in development thinking comes naturally to them. As a result, most of our work has been to unify and extend practices already in use to make them more consumable by those developing software products.

This project started after a conversation Carl had with Alfred Spector, who was, at the time, the vice president of strategy and technology for IBM’s Software Group. The topic of discussion was how to help our clients and partners build more successful software. Sending a ...