Agile product development: an analysis of acceptance and added value in practice

Abstract

Manufacturing companies are increasingly integrating agile approaches into their development processes. This is expected to improve customer integration, enhance responsiveness to changes in the development context and ultimately lead to improved process and product quality. However, since agile approaches mostly originate from the culture of software development and have been formulated on the basis of observations of successful software projects, new challenges arise in the application of these approaches in physical systems development. Often the approaches fail due to false expectations or lack of acceptance, which causes agility not to be deeply integrated into the processes. For this reason, this contribution presents an understanding of the current state of acceptance of agile working and the expected and perceived added value of using agile approaches in practice. Based on this understanding, future research will develop a systematic by means of which agile elements can be introduced into development processes in a way that is appropriate to the situation and needs, thereby increasing acceptance and perceived added value. Since it is empirical research, which analyses real-world processes, a survey was chosen as a suitable research method. 235 participants from different branches in the area of physical product development in Germany participated. The results were analyzed using usual statistical methods. An assumption that there are discrepancies between strategic and operational views on agile working could not be confirmed. However, optimization criteria in the area of acceptance of agile approaches were identified. The research contributed to the understanding of the current performance level in the field of agile development of physical systems. The identified potentials in the area of acceptance and perceived added value in agile work can now be measured specifically for each individual application and realized with suitable methods, what contributes to a sustainable integration of agile methods into the development processes.