Suitability of state of the art methods for interdisciplinary system development in automotive industry

At present, system development in the automotive industry is characterized by increasing complexity and frequent changes caused by frequent innovations, fast-growing system complexity, expanding role of software, and changing business relationships. This dynamical environment demands flexible system development processes. The application of an inflexible process would usually result in the project team ignoring the process and performing development based on their own implicit knowledge and experience. Therefore practitioners are looking for development processes that strike a balance between project control, desired by project managers, and process flexibility, desired by developers. This paper presents an analysis of the suitability of existing system development methods for the style of interdisciplinary system development found in the automotive industry. Based on the results from the analysis, a plan for future research is derived from identified deficiencies of existing approaches.