Hybridization of Development Projects Through Process-related Combination of Agile and Plan-driven Approaches

In times of volatile markets and heterogeneous customer demands, it now seems inevitable for the manufacturing industry to deal with iterative development cycles in order to maintain process flexibility and to be able to react to unforeseen environmental changes. Since the implementation of agile methods is not purposive for every development process of a physical product, the usage of hybrid approaches, a development procedure resulting of the combination of agile and plan-driven methods, is emerging as an alternative. According to that, this paper presents a research framework that shows how hybrid development processes can enable the effective and efficient implementation of physical product development projects by ensuring a target-conform and context-based combination of agile and plan-driven approaches.