Agile Systems Engineering in Complex Scenarios

Abstract

The successful development of complex Systems of Systems (SoS) is highly dependent on quality of the requirements engineering (RE). The goal is to get “good” requirements in the beginning and to keep them stable until the delivery of the final product. In reality, this is wishful thinking. In complex real-world scenarios the requirements are never fully understood and never stable - they evolve during the development process. This is a severe issue for complex and highly elaborated systems engineering processes. Usually, the projects get out of control due to the change requests or do not deliver a result fitting the current need of the customer. Elaborated innovation management, marketing and customer relation processes are used to understand the need of the customer (market pull) and the new technical possibilities (technology push). The design and implementation of such innovation management processes is complex in itself and well researched. This paper extends the state-of-the-art with a focus on the interfacing between the systems engineering process (for the product development) and the innovation management process (for the ideation and innovation creation). We propose a parallel, interlinked execution of both processes instead of the over-the-fence practice where an innovation idea is handed over to product development at a certain point of time. A continuous interaction of both processes with agile management methods reduces the risk of getting the wrong product. Instead of using wrong or outdated information in the product development due to the missing updates from innovation management, a continuous linking and exchange mechanism with the systems engineering project is proposed. Interlinking these two complex processes is addressed with scenario-based methods and a process similar to BizDevOps. The full paper will evaluate the concepts based on a complex eMobility case study.