Agile Methods for Design to Customer
Year: 2009
Editor: Norell Bergendahl, M.; Grimheden, M.; Leifer, L.; Skogstad, P.; Lindemann, U.
Author: Feldhusen, Jörg; Löwer, Manuel; Bungert, Frederik
Series: ICED
Section: Design Methods and Tools
Page(s): 451-460
Abstract
Not only products but also product development get more and more complex. International teams at different locations spread over the globe have to elaborate adequate solutions in shorter project cycles. Market conditions are rapidly changing not only caused by increasing demands on individuality but also due to political, economic and ecological influences. In order to remain competitive, customer satisfaction is the key. A major hindrance in this context is the limited ability of customers to express or even comprehensively identify their own requirements. But also manufacturers often have a lack of knowledge concerning their customers or relevant target groups. The approach delineated in this contribution introduces a concept of adopting agile methods of the software community to engineering, which allows detecting aberrations from demands and requirements early in the development process. The aim is to iteratively build (virtual) prototypes that consider only the main and obvious requirements in the first step. After each iteration an evaluation discloses whether the realization has met the expectations and additional requirements can be taken into account for the next step.
Keywords: Design to Customer, Agile Methods, Iterative Prototyping, Agile Product Development