When individual teams in mechatronic organizations attempt to adopt agile software practices, these practices tend to only affect modules or sub-systems. The short iterations on team level do not lead to short lead-times in launching new or updated products since the overall R&D approach on an organization level is still governed by an overall stage gate or single cycle V-model. This paper identifies challenges for future research on how to combine the predictability and planning desired of mechanical manufacturing with the dynamic capabilities of modern agile software development. Scaling agile in this context requires an expansion in two dimensions: First, scaling the number of involved teams. Second, traversing necessary systems engineering activities in each sprint due to the co-dependency of software and hardware development.

Practitioners are poorly supported by the scientific literature when managing traceability information models (TIMs), which capture the structure and semantics of trace links. In practice, companies manage their TIMs in very different ways, even in cases where companies share many similarities. We present our findings from an in-depth focus group about TIM management with three different systems engineering companies. We find that the concrete needs of the companies as well as challenges such as scale and workflow integration are not considered by existing scientific work. We thus issue a call-to-arms for the requirements engineering and software and systems traceability communities, the two main communities for traceability research, to refocus their work on these practical problems.

No abstract