Systems teams, development projects, and organizations, who are involved in product development, are often faced with the question as to whether they should adapt agile systems practices into their programs and processes. In trying to answer this question these groups are almost immediately confronted with the problem of determining what is motivating the decision, where should agile principles be applied, and how much agility is necessary. There are several interrelated systems involved in this inquiry and the development of a proper understanding around these considerations is not a trivial exercise. A method of inquiry and decision making that is in itself agile and that can produce actionable results needs to guide the development of this understanding. The purpose of this paper is to present work accomplished to date on the definition, prototyping, and evaluation of a decision guidance system to help a development team or organization achieve a necessary understanding that can lead to useful actionable decisions regarding agile adoption.
System development teams often face challenges outside of pure technical problems. There are unpredictable circumstances in many areas including customer needs, personnel changes, and sociotechnical issues that can span across the development organization such as knowledge management and goal alignment. This paper presents the results of an exploratory case study on a university CubeSat team developing an Earth Observation satellite. Formal analysis of agile systems engineering helps improve success throughout the CubeSat lifecycle. We apply the INCOSE Agile systems engineering WG decision guidance method for applying agile system engineering method to identify areas in which the project organization can improve to become more agile in three specific problem spaces: customer problem space, solution space, and product development space. The analysis process led to valuable insights about how the project organization of an academic project differs from that of industry. Additionally, the results indicate that areas such as stakeholder management and support environment could be factors that would benefit more from agile responsiveness.
University CubeSat projects become popular in recent decades, and face challenges that include both technical and sociotechnical aspects. However, these teams often lack the infrastructure and resources for having effective systems engineering or project management which are beneficial for addressing these challenges and developing complex systems, such as satellites. In this paper we present the results of an exploratory case study of a university CubeSat team developing an Earth Observation satellite. The Agile Decision Guidance method was applied to pinpoint parts of the project organization that could benefit from agile methods in three specific areas: customer problem space, solution space, and product development space. The results drew attention to areas such as; stakeholder management, knowledge and information management, and the support environment, that could benefit from an agile approach. We outline some of the plans to move forward and how the team responded to the analysis. We also discuss if the method was appropriate for academic small satellite organizations and adaptations of the method made during the assessment.
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