Agile development has successfully established itself for coping with VUCA conditions on a team level. Furthermore, in developing cyber-physical systems or mechatronic products, the collaboration of ...multiple teams is often necessary. This necessity to scale contrasts with the paradigm of agile development from which additional challenges arise. The study examines the current challenges in scaling agile product development, characterized by scale-related challenges and physical constraints. This paper provides an empirical investigation to address these challenges. This publication shows that product development's top challenges are synchronization, coordination, resource allocation, and dependencies between different organizational units. It is determined that the challenges in the non-scaled environment also apply to scaling; however, substantial differences in their dependencies exist. Furthermore, an attempt to explain differences in scaled agile software development using comparative analysis is given. It becomes apparent that challenges such as production setup or physical limitations are non-existent.
Nowadays, the product development processes have faced challenges for more effective, agile characteristics. Moreover, traditional methods for data retrieval from customers for their behavioral ...prediction have lost their efficiency. Social media platforms have provided enormous potentials for discovery of customer behavioral models. In the current study we investigated the association between brain activities and consumers’ behaviour. Additionally, we investigated whether pre-trained Python models for sentiment analyses predict consumer behaviour and assessed it's association with brain activities during decision-making tasks. Neural and behavioral responses of participants used for analysis of their decision making processes when choosing their product of interest. This has been accomplished while the participants’ brain activities were recorded at pre-test (baseline) and during each decision-making tasks. Results of this study revealed significant association between certain resting-state EEG power spectral densities and consumer decisions. Moreover, sentiment analysis models showed good accuracy in predicting product like/disliking. These findings demonstrates the potential of combination of neuroscience and sentiment analysis methods in consumers’ behaviour research especially for agile product development processes.
The increasing dynamization of markets, changing customer requirements and unpredictable occurrences pose new challenges for product development and design. Agile methods and processes can serve as a ...solution to secure the innovation capability of organizations in this environment. Since the areas of agility and innovation capability of organizations have mostly been treated separately in research, this research effort is focusing at hollistically collecting success factors for agility and success factors for the innovation capability of organizations and analyzing them in detail - including collecting indicators and directional characteristics. The analyzed factors are specifically focused on the development of mechatronic products and are intended to serve as a type of library that enables organizations and researchers to understand their own situation as best as possible, select appropriate recommendations for action in a targeted manner, and track their implementation / operationalization on the basis of the corresponding indicators and characteristics. This research work thus makes a contribution to sustainably increasing innovation capability and agility of industrial organizations.
Nowadays, manufacturing companies are challenged by dynamic market environments caused by increasing globalization, digitization and climate change. Therefore, the ability to act with speed, ...flexibility and efficiency in product development becomes inevitable for success. Moreover, various stakeholder requirements have to be considered and time to market has to be reduced. The development of complex mechatronic systems also requires an interdisciplinary cooperation of various engineering domains, i.e. mechanics, electrical engineering and computer science.
Agile product development addresses these challenges with its focus on the iterative development of functional system increments. As a result, it enables to reduce time to market and improves handling of changing customer requirements. The model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approach with its centralized system model serves as a single source of truth and data repository. Thereby, it enhances efficiency and transparency along the product development process. The integration of MBSE into agile product development offers numerous opportunities, such as virtual prototypes and the build-up of a product’s digital twin. As the design of a complete system model at the beginning of a development process requires high temporary resources, an iterative approach should be applied to incrementally build the system model along the product development process.
In this paper a methodology for the iterative system modeling in agile product development is presented. In each agile sprint, design parameters based on a development question are elaborated. The information that supports answering the development questions is provided by the system model. Since the system model itself can only provide but not process information it is necessary to select the best toolset to process the necessary information. By transferring the information back to the system model, the elements of the system model itself are iteratively developed and updated.
Companies face a variety of challenges in the product development of intelligent technical systems. On the one hand, companies have to manage a high level of product complexity and have to ensure ...efficient interdisciplinary cooperation. On the other hand, they must shorten the duration of the product development process and react quickly to changing requirements. Agile methods are a promising approach for these challenges. For example, agile methods shorten the duration of product development by eliminating a detailed initial planning. Furthermore, they enable a high degree of flexibility by using short iterations with quick feedback. Moreover, they ensure an optimally interdisciplinary collaboration by establishing development teams with experts from various specialized disciplines. Agile methods primarily focus on software development. However, intelligent technical systems consist of software components as well as hardware components. Therefore, the implementation of agile methods into the product development process is not trivial. For example, quick prototyping and active involvement of the customer within the development process is hard to realize for physical products. Therefore, the measuring of benefit potentials of agile methods and the tailored integration in the product development of intelligent technical systems is highly important. However, the mentioned challenges are barely addressed within current approaches. In order to adress these challenges, this paper presents an agile toolbox and a corresponding procedure model to integrate agile practices in the product development process of intelligent technical systems. First, the agile toolbox is developed by identifying individual practices of agile methods (e.g. iterative planning). Second, the presented procedure model enables the identification of company-specific requirements and the elaboration of a hybrid product development process based on the practices of the agile toolbox. The approach is validated by presenting an example from industrial practice.
Agility is a central instrument for reacting appropriately to dynamic influences and enabling innovation capability. However, rigid production systems can no longer meet the requirements of agile ...product development and innovation processes. Flexible production systems like the 'Value Stream Kinematics' provide benefits for producing companies. In this research effort, the ‘Persona-method’ has been used to derive typical individuals who are influenced by a socio-technical system, specifically by a flexible production system. Based on these results holistic use cases of flexible production systems for the product development process and production system development were identified and described as well as discussed in detail. The comparison of agility barriers within industrial companies and the identified specific use cases of a flexible production system shows that agility barriers in product and production system development can be overcome by utilizing a flexible production system.
Agile development has become a standard procedure in the software industry in the course of the past 20 years and is advancing into physical product development nowadays as well. When talking with ...peers and fellow experts from both academia and industry, ambiguities on the usage of the terms used in agile development becomes apparent. Therefore, this contribution aims at proposing a taxonomy for the field of agile development by comparing its key elements to the traditional field of product development. The terms are well-grounded in scientific literature and by applying a systematic as well as a hierarchical approach, the terms are classified into the three layers of the St. Gallen management model proposed by Bleicher. In order to validate the taxonomy, comparisons to the field of traditional product development are given. In line with this, the alignment of specific terms used in ‘Scrum’ into the taxonomy for agile development underpins its validity.
Agile product development methods help to reduce the product development time. The resulting shorter time-to-market ensures a company’s competitiveness. For a time-reduced development process and ...product lifecycle, the response time to end customer requirements must be decreased as product complexity increases. This requires special methods and tools for customer integration into the agile product development process. Existing approaches do not meet these requirements and an analysis of tools and methods for customer integration and a new method for customer integration is needed.
The core of the work is developing a new method for customer integration into the agile product development process through customer surveys. The method includes two separate use cases for this purpose. Use case one considers customer integration regarding the overall product structure, whereas use case two considers customer integration in selecting specific development concepts. Both use cases include physical and virtual products. The connection of the method to agile product development identifies the results as new tasks. It is possible to run the 28-hour method several times within a sprint. In an exemplary case, the method is implemented in a software tool, tested with 130 end customers and verified by the requirements.
Der Bericht zeigt anhand einer Fallstudie aus der Zentralbibliothek Zürich auf, welche Vorteile und Herausforderungen die agile Produktentwicklung an Bibliotheken haben kann. Im Zentrum steht dabei ...das Rahmenwerk Scrum, welches zur Entwicklung des Fallbeispiels – eines Escape Games – genutzt wurde. Wie der Bericht nahelegt, hängt der Erfolg der agilen Produktentwicklung wesentlich vom Komplexitätsgrad des Produktes sowie vom gemeinsamen Verständnis von Scrum und seiner Einbettung in andere Projektmanagement-Verfahren ab.
Many scholars argue that very early design phases are not supported adequately in many respects, although they are at the cornerstone of successful new product development. Difficulties in developing ...appropriate methods emerge because of the need to account for uncertainties and ambiguities that feature the Fuzzy Front End. This is likely the reason behind the limited industrial adoption of existing design methods, especially those that are oriented to support Product Planning. In this context, the thrust of the paper is the attempt to identify key activities and functions featuring Product Planning. The study entrusts figures about the foreseeable growth of the intensity of research displayed by classes of methods supporting different functions in Product Planning. As the data, emerging from the application of S-curves, indicate no preferential direction in the medium term, other phenomena are monitored that might overturn the conventional systematic course of action to design in the early stages. The 'trial-and-error' learning approach characterising agile strategies can be seen as a partial answer to the expected demise of research about Product Planning. Beyond these conclusions, the paper includes a frame of reference that classifies Product Planning methods (adequately reviewed) beyond the classical distinction between responsive and proactive approaches.
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