How useful is the metaphor component of agile methods? : a preliminary study

Abstract: "The 'metaphor' is the practice of agile processes most ignored by practitioners. A metaphor is meant to be agreed upon by all members of a project as a means of simply explaining the purpose of the project and thus guide the structure of the architecture, thus it is very important for communication, both among the team and with the client. Since both customers and developers alike use the metaphor to clarify the project, a good metaphor should be easily understandable to customers, yet have sufficient content that it can guide architecture development. This paper experiments with the metaphor as a communication tool."