A New Agile Hybridization Approach and a Set of Related Guidelines for Mechatronic Product Development

In industry 4.0, the growing incorporation of cyber-physical systems (CPS) into manufacturing facilities composed of mechatronic products brings forth the need of reducing development cost while maintaining the quality and in parallel the need to adapt changes along the lifecycle of the product development. Most of the traditional development methods fail to solve such new challenges. However, some agile methods, widely used in the software industry, could meet these requirements. It is then essential to identify the criticalities of agile methods regarding mechatronic system development specificities. As a result, our research work focuses on combining traditional and agile approaches to improve mechatronic products development in a changing market context. The development of hybrid approach is based on the analysis of traditional, agile methods and consideration of challenges in the development of mechatronic products. To illustrate the advantages of such hybridization, we propose a first hybrid approach consisting of some elements of the Scrum method (the most popular agile approach) into the V-Model. Differentiating advantages of this new approach, compared to other agile methods, include the freedom to propagate necessary changes in product architecture during the development of its different modules. This new approach focuses on the hybridization of traditional and agile methods and the required guidelines to adopt and use for enhanced mechatronic products development. These guidelines are the base for changing the organizational culture and values which were previously associated with traditional development approaches.