There is increasing pressure on organisations to deliver working systems to business in ever shorter timescales. The Framework For Business Centered Development (version 4 of DSDM) describes an iterative and incremental approach to developing software that is clearly driven by and responsive to the changing needs of the business. The concept of customer collaboration underpins the DSDM way of working. The iterative DSDM development process is designed specifically to support a number of collaborative techniques to ensure that a project delivers exactly what is needed within the normal constraints of time, budget and resources. The clear definition of a variety of customer roles forms part of DSDM and is considered critical to the success of the approach.

Like the Eclipse Foundation, the DSDM Consortium is keen to promote best practice in software development in general and to this end is contributing the definition of its customer roles to the OpenUP approach.

As an Agile process, DSDM promotes active user involvement within the project team and defines specific roles that enable this. The DSDM Plugin for OpenUP adds these roles to the OpenUP base, increasing the team's capability for collaborative software development.