Performance Assessment of Agile Hardware Co-development Process

This paper investigates how different Hybrid Agile Product Development Process (hybrid PDP) architectures affect project performance in space hardware development. The performance benchmark of alternative hybrid Agile PDPs offers valuable information for structuring Minimum Viable Products in order to meet customer needs while improving effectiveness and efficiency of the PDP. We propose a modeling framework to simulate iterations through the product development process, and therefore optimize tasks definition in Agile frameworks while accounting for product interdependencies between components, subsystems and relevant lifecycle processes such as assembly, integration, testing, procurement, and validation. The framework has been verified on a case study of an undisclosed telecommunication payload hosted onboard a nanosatellite mission. The results provide an initial understanding of the applicability of Agile methods to the co-development of complex engineering systems based on experimental data (notably tasks, task durations, dependencies, and cost) that have been collected on the field as well as simulation outputs. The model we propose also represents an effective decision making support instrument to evaluate the programmatic and technical tradeoffs.