AgileTecting: A principled approach to introducing agility in systems engineering and product development enterprises

Competitive market forces continue to impose challenging tradeoffs in the development of complex systems and products. On the one hand, there is great pressure to incorporate the latest breakthroughs. On the other hand, system reliability cannot be compromised. Agile systems architecting in concerned with balancing these competing requirements while determining where and how agility should be introduced to achieve a competitive advantage and/or requisite adaptability to changing circumstances. Agility in the development process is needed to rapidly and cost-effectively exploit technology breakthroughs for improving process efficiencies and costs. Agility in the end product is needed to ensure adaptability to a new environment or changing circumstances and to opportunistically upgrade component technologies to reduce lifecycle costs and improve ilities. This paper introduces agility from several perspectives and presents AgileTecting, a principled approach to determining if and where agility is needed and to what degree, and subsequently guiding its introduction in the process and/or product with corresponding recommendations for infrastructure, organization and cultural changes.