Application of Axiomatic Design for Agile Product Development

Agile, and iterative, development methods for new product development are gaining in popularity under product engineers; where it initially was just applied for software development, now larger adoption takes place for product development in general. The design rules of agile development are somewhat conflicting with the guidelines of Axiomatic Design. In this paper, it is investigated why this is the case, what can be done about it, and how can the strengths of agile development be combined with Axiomatic Design to optimise methods for product design. It is shown that the methods are indeed advising on different and conflicting strategies, however, by attenuating the agile design rules in the early stage of design, and doing the same for AD in the later stage of design, best of both worlds can be combined.