Agile approaches for the development of smart services

Product-centric companies nowadays increasingly have to deal with adding smart services to their products to form a holistic product offer. Thus, this study aims at identifying how such companies approach software development and to which degree they involve partners. Moreover, it aims at identifying patterns of agile development throughout different companies. A comparative interview study based on narrative interviews was conducted with 11 companies from the Austrian energy and food technology sector. Some agility criteria like support of rapid feedback, adaptability of requirements and the characteristic iterative way of developing were found to be implemented in the development processes of all companies. The development teams were almost always self-organized and diverse. Other criteria like a retrospective phase or small development teams were not present. We found that customers as well as employees were involved to test prototypes. Furthermore, almost half of the companies claimed to work agile.