Activity Mapping of Development Methods as a Decision Aid for Hardware Development Programs

Adoption of alternate development methods throughout engineering domains is resulting in more effective execution. However, implementation of such methods for hardware development programs has not been widely adopted or their processes well documented. To understand their potential for implementation, the generic life cycle defined in the INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook is set as the baseline for comparison of development methods. This work analyzes six alternate development methods including design thinking, lean product development, agile, set-based concurrent engineering, systems thinking, and development and operations, focusing on their activities and overall flow to not only align them with the generic life cycle for visual representation of development progression, but more importantly, to map the similarities between the activities of the concept and development stages of the generic life cycle. Presented in this work is a mapping that compares the execution of the generic life-cycle baseline development activities to their occurrence in the six methods discussed. This mapping can be used as a decision aid within the hardware domain for determining the feasibility of an alternate method, giving programs a tailorable approach for hardware development.