VDA Agile Collaboration, 1st edition, January 2021

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Disruptive technologies are having a rapid impact on the automotive industry by decreasing the barriers to entry. Dealing with increasing complexity and being able to react more flexibly in volatile markets is becoming more and more important. As the speed of change will continue, a growing number of companies are transforming towards agility, as this has been proven to be a smart answer to todays VUCA environment. As automotive companies see the benefit in working agile internally, the motivation to profit from these benefits by using it beyond company borders is increasing. Even though the benefits may be obvious, creating an agile interface – or rather collaborating in an agile framework – can cause some challenges, which definitely gives rise to the need for a guideline.
The VDA recommendations provides a blueprint on how an Agile Collaboration across company borders could work, while considering that the basic understanding and the intensity may vary. The vision for this guide is to equip the partners (Client, Contractor) with a toolbox, common language and practical use cases, as well as techniques to enable better results in such a collaboration model.
This handbook targets people from the automotive industry who already have experience in basic agile development methods. In addition to basic experience with agile methods, there are many other enablers that are helpful in the implementation of Agile Collaboration, such as an agile mindset among the participating partners (e.g., trust, customer orientation, a "fail-fast" approach) and tools and processes for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). This handbook is not an exhaustive collection of enablers, prerequisites and good practices for agile working. Rather, it focuses on Agile Collaboration across company borders. The main focus is the software technology perspective with regards to skill definitions from software domain. Other domains like hardware are only touched on the surface.