This white paper focusses on how systems engineering and agile approaches could complement each other.
It describes a framework that can be used to embed agile development into a systems engineering driven
product development process. Such a framework must consider constraints given by large projects and large,
historically grown organizations. Therefore, this white paper makes suggestions on how to adapt the
framework to the different contexts and projects found in real world. It also explains how the framework can
be embedded into a classic Product Development Process (PDP).
The “Agile SE” framework described in this whitepaper has many similarities with the Scaled Agile Framework
(SAFe). Several ideas from SAFe were adopted in Agile SE. However, Agile SE is not SAFe as it embeds
those ideas in a context of systems engineering and a typical Product Development Process (PDP) and
describes, how they can coexist.