Research On Multidisciplinary Integrated Iterative Process

A proper process is significant to successful product development. Traditional product development process usually adopts serial heavyweight discrete methods, and cannot satisfy the needs of consumer electronics product development. Therefore, it's of great significance to establish an efficient product development process.By investigating and analyzing the latest research of Software Engineering, Product Development and Systems Engineering, we find that Iterative Development Method is becoming a mainstream of software process method instead of Waterfall Model in the field of Software Engineering. Based on Iterative Development Method, RUP provides a detailed definition as a COTS process, and Agile Methods provide many successful practices for establishing lightweight process and shortening development duration. But these processes and methods provides neither definition of activities of disciplines other than software, nor solution of applying Iterative Development Method under multidisciplinary interweaved condition. Likewise, the process methods in the fields of Systems Engineering and Product Development are too abstract and generalized, lacking solution of establishing an efficient product development process conform to characteristics of electronics product development.In order to establish a lightweight process for consumer electronics product development that can effectively support the iterative essential of product development and effectively integrate and coordinate multidisciplinary activity, we analyzed the iterative characteristic of product development process, applied Iterative Development Method to electronics product development process and developed solutions for key problems while doing so. Furthermore, we proposed an iterative-development-method-based multidiscipline-integrated process for consumer electronics product development, named Multidisciplinary Integrated Iterative Process, by integrating process methods of fields of Software Engineering, Product Development and Systems Engineering, defining the key practices system, architecture and concrete processes of MIIP.Based on the theoretical research, we applied MIIP to the process improvement activity of a large electronics product provider, in a pilot project which is a typical Death March, and achieved good practical effect. The duration of the project was much shorter than the average of the company. The variation between actual duration and planned duration of the project was kept in a very low level. The survey after pilot-running showed that MIIP has good efficiency and applicability. MIIP also was verified and improved in practice.