Agile Hardware Prototyping : A case study on agility and prototype workshops,obstacles and enablers

Abstract: Agile is on the rise. The popular software development practice is making its way over to hardware development and companies are adopting it to reap the benefits. This phenomenon has been investigated to some degree and many companies are still trying to figure out if it is a useful way of working for them or not. At the Swedish MedTech company, Elekta, mechanical designers and engineers believe that hardware prototyping could be done better and faster than today. Elekta made an agile transformation to SAFe, which stands for Scaled Agile Framework, a few years ago and the hardware development struggle to match the speed of the development of software. Not much literature is aimed at agile hardware prototyping in particular. In the pursuit of adapting agile hardware development literature particularly to the prototyping process and investigating the actual process at the company, the case study presented in this report was formed. First, to explore the topic, a pre-study of orienting interviews was conducted and was complemented by a literature review. These then made up the basis for a qualitative interview study that consisted of semi-structured interviews with 12 employees at Elekta, as well as 5 employees at 5 other companies for benchmarking. The goals of this thesis project were to make recommendations to Elekta on how to adapt their prototyping process to better fit agile, as well as contribute to the relatively unexplored field of agile hardware prototyping. The case study resulted in a number of identified obstacles and enablers a company might have when implementing agile frameworks for hardware prototyping. Some of the obstacles identified were the difficulty of planning and dividing hardware in smaller tasks, not having in-house production and the difficulty to adapt to an agile mindset and focusing too much on the process of SAFe. Some of the enablers found were modularity, 3D-printing and having in-house capabilities for manufacturing prototypes. A prototyping workshop enables shorter feedback loops, which in turn enables a more agile process. The study also resulted in suggestions to Elekta, mainly concerning setting up a new prototyping workshop solution for the company, to adapt the prototyping process to better fit agile.