Design of agile development processes for technical systems

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Günther Schuh
• Subject Area: Engineering Design, Machine Elements, Product Development ; Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 339647300

The increase of heterogeneous customer requirements, rising competitive constraints as well as the hereby shortened product lifecycles force producing companies in high-wage countries to design and implement new development processes in order to ensure the competitiveness as well as future viability by realizing the efficiency and effectivity requirements on product development. One approach, which successfully addresses the described challenges already within software industry, is provided by using agile development processes. Even the transfer of agile development processes towards non-software industries is expected to be promising, this direct transfer is not possible due to alternate, domain-specific requirements like immateriality and non-deterministic progression. Therefore, the objective of this research approach is the conceptual design of a method which transfers the mechanisms of agile software development towards the development of technical systems including its characteristic constraints in order to enable the optimization of the success criteria quality, costs and time-to-market. Besides the analysis of interactions of identified agile mechanisms of action as well as process elements of the development of technical systems, the research project especially aims at the design of agile product development processes in form of situation-dependent configurable types of iterations. The applicability and transfer of the developed method is furthermore ensured by validating the approach with industrial companies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants