A LESSON IN CONFLICT MITIGATION: INTEGRATING DIVERGENT DESIGN PHILOSOPHIES

摘要

The Mars Rover Design Team is dedicated to building a next generation rover that will one dayudassist astronauts in the field. The complexity of such a project increases when the two conflictinguddesign philosophies of agile software development and traditional waterfall development mustudwork in tandem in order to design and construct a rover within a year. Agile softwareuddevelopment promotes the flexible, testdrivenudproduction of coinciding design aspects, whileudthe waterfall design philosophy relies on thorough planning and rigid, sequential designudschedules. The project managers of the team work to balance these opposing philosophies byudfostering individual interests, allowing team members to select their own focus areas within audwide variety of mission critical tasks. This practice accelerates the design and construction of theudrover and in turn creates the momentum needed to achieve a common goal while consolidatingudboth agile software and traditional waterfall development.