Agile Product Development outside Software Development

During the recent years, hardware product development has changed. More and more complex products arrived on the market, often including sensors and software, collecting data and elaborating them. Also the customers have changed, and the demand for a constant release of new and customizable products has increased. In this framework, the traditional product development methods may not be adequate. One of the possible solutions could be represented by the adaptation of agile software development methods to the hardware domain. The aim of this thesis is to investigate such a possibility. After a first chapter focused on the historical background of agile methods for software development, the second chapter goes one step further and discusses agile’s state of the art outside their original domain. This literature review permits to identify some recurring trends in modern product development, such as the use of prototyping, the importance of customer requirements, and other practices that get hardware development closer to agile software development. These trends provide positive effects in reducing documentation, allowing for later changes in requirements, and increasing knowledge and transparency in multidisciplinary teams. Some limitations are identified as well, such as the impossibility of a direct application of agile methods to hardware development without a dedicated fine-tuning process. Finally, the third chapter presents an analysis performed on a series of case studies, aimed at validating the results obtained in the previous chapter. Examining real-life applications of agile methods on larger scale projects, it was possible to confirm their potentiality, even if some challenges are still present.