Charting Coordination Needs in Large-Scale Agile Organisations with Boundary Objects and Methodological Islands

Large-scale system development companies are increasingly adopting agile methods. While this adoption may improve lead-times, such companies need to balance two trade-offs: (i) the need to have a uniform, consistent development method on system level with the need for specialised methods for teams in different disciplines (e.g., hardware, software, mechanics, sales, support); (ii) the need for comprehensive documentation on system level with the need to have lightweight documentation enabling iterative and agile work. With specialised methods for teams, isolated teams work within larger ecosystems of plan-driven culture, i.e., teams become agile “islands”. At the boundaries, these teams share knowledge which needs to be managed well for a correct system to be developed. While it is useful to support diverse and specialised methods, it is important to understand which islands are repeatedly encountered, the reasons or factors triggering their existence, and how best to handle coordination between them. Based on a multiple case study, this work presents a catalogue of islands and the boundary objects between them. We believe this work will be beneficial to practitioners aiming to understand their ecosystems and researchers addressing communication and coordination challenges in large-scale development

Semantic interoperability for an integrated product development process: a systematic literature review

International audienceGlobal competitiveness challenges manufacturing industry to rationalise different ways of bringing to the market new products in a short lead-time with competitive prices while ensuring higher quality levels and customisation. Industries need to effectively share heterogeneous information during Product Development Process (PDP) within and across their institutional boundaries to be competitive. However, problems with misinterpretation and mistakes have been identified during information exchange due to the semantic interoperability obstacles. Thus, this research proposes a systematic literature review to identify the main researches and the milestones reference works on semantic interoperability field. A rigorous methodology was conducted in different databases, covering the articles published in scientific journals from 2005 to 2015 as a preliminary study had indicated that the incidence of articles related to the subject was more frequent from the second half of the 2000s. The research structure consisted of four steps: Survey-searching, analysis and selection of recent researches; Categorization-categorization of the selected papers; References citation frequency analysis-the selected papers were analysed and the main researches and milestones references were identified; and Main researches critical analysis – the main researches were analysed for their contributions and limitations, their contributions and limitations, resulting in 14 selected scientific articles and 8 identified milestones references. It is evident that this field has interesting perspectives on future research opportunities on semantic interoperability of information issues across PDP, contributing to the new concepts of future factories

A Study investigating Challenges in the Interface Between Product Development and Manufacturing in the Development of Software-Intensive Automotive Systems

The automotive industry is facing a tremendous growth in the engineering of software-intensive systems, giving rise to various challenges. To prevent problems related to the fit of new software technologies in vehicles and the manufacturing processes, a well functioning interaction between the functions for product development and manufacturing is crucial. This is complicated by the fact that the changeable nature of software development causes unprecedented needs for collaboration and coordination between these two functions. This paper reports on a process assessment that focuses on the interface between the functions for product development and manufacturing in the development and design of software-intensive automotive systems. The main purpose of the study was to identify the key issues for improvement in the area assessed. The assessment was performed at two Swedish automotive companies where data were collected from documents and in interviews with practitioners. Nine key improvement issues were established ranging from challenges in requirements engineering to the need for knowledge transfer between manufacturing and product development. In addition, to increase the understandability of the results and map possible avenues for solution and future research, the paper provides an extensive analysis of each improvement issue in relation to the state-of-the-art