Toward a Hybrid Agile Product Development Process

Abstract

Both startups and traditional space industry are exploring new business opportunities and new engineering approaches in what is becoming known now as New Space. Organizations started accelerating project schedules and challenging the V-model typically used in space product development. The need of a faster and more adaptive response to changing customer needs within an improved development productivity made Agile process a potential key enabler of New Space sector. On the other hand, space system projects are typically executed in multi-party consortia. Each organization in a consortium adopts its own product development process and interprets “New Space” differently. For this reason, the implementation of Agile is not seamless as it requires coordination with traditional systems engineering approaches. This setup is what we refer to as “hybrid Agile product development process”. This paper provides a first definition of the architecture of hybrid product development process targeted toward systems development and lifecycle management of hardware projects developed by multi-party consortia. We consider this discussion in the context of the development of spaceflight hardware in the New Space industry. We identify the main challenges in adopting such a methodology in developing hardware systems. This work identifies opportunities of future work for defining coordination approaches in hybrid product development settings, and improved organization structures of hardware projects in hybrid development contexts.