Agility in Telecommunication Product Development, Challenges and The Way Forward

On time delivery of products with industry expected suite of features is one of the most common challenge for any product development organization. In order to address this, most of the software product development organizations have transformed their processes to agile models in recent years. Though most of them have tried to implement available flavors of agile models such as Scrum, Extreme programming, Test Driven Development etc., there is a wide variation on methods they use, challenges they face, and the level of their adoption. Adoption level varies among different sectors in the industry. The level is high for web development, pure software & cloud-based product companies, wherein it is low for organizations developing systems with special hardware and embedded software such as communication products. This is basically due to the complexity of the processes they use in their product development lifecycles. At least some phases of their development lifecycle find it difficult to meet requirements expected by the regular agile models such as quick turnaround time, light weight viable deliverables with business value etc. This paper discusses some of the prominent process models used by telecommunication product industry, reasons for low adoption of Agile models, challenges faced while implementing related practices; suggests how to overcome those challenges by making use of traditional methods like Kanban and practices from recent innovations such as DevOps to get prepared for the way forward.