Evolution of the Hype around Agile Hardware Development

Abstract

Agile development is no silver bullet - therefore, the contribution investigates how the perception of agility is changing over time as well as from different viewpoints. The results discussed in this contribution have been obtained in the course of two studies, which have been carried out in both 2017 and 2018. The focus of that studies' series is the field of agile development of physical products. The 2017 study revealed that agile hardware development shows benefits rather in `soft' factors like transparency, commitment and communication. Expectations in the `hard' factors (controlling KPI's) quality, cost and time-to-market are overestimated and thus hyped, as of today. Based on the findings of 2017, a follow-up study has been conducted to investigate how the field of agile hardware development has matured over time and how the hype is evolving. It turned out that there is a large deviation in terms of the expectations and thus the different perspectives of both project management and research and development, which are the key drivers of the hype.