Agility meets systems engineering: A catalogue of success factors from industry practice

Abstract

Agile software development methods are widely accepted and valued in software-dominated industries. In more complex setups like multidisciplinary system development the adoption of an agile development paradigm is much less straightforward. Bigger teams, longer development cycles, process and product standard compliance and products lacking flexibility make an agile behaviour more difficult to achieve. Focusing on the fundamental underlying problem of dealing with ever ongoing change, this paper presents an agile Systems Engineering approach as a potential solution. Therefore a generic Systems Engineering action model was upgraded respecting agile principles and adapted according to practical needs discovered in an empirical study. This study was conducted among the partners of the S2QI agile workgroup made up from experts of automotive, logistics and electronics industries. Additionally to an agile Systems Engineering action model, a list of 15 practical success factors that should be considered when using an agile Systems Engineering approach is one of the main outcomes of this survey. It was also found that an agile behaviour in Systems Engineering could be supported in many different areas within companies. These areas are listed and it is also shown how the agile action model and the agile success factors are related to them. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.