Towards a Flexible and Secure Round-Trip-Engineering Process for Production Systems Engineering with Agile Practices

Abstract

In Production Systems Engineering (PSE), many projects conceptually follow the plan of traditional waterfall processes with sequential process steps and limited security activities, while engineers actually work in parallel and distributed groups following a Round-Trip-Engineering (RTE) process. Unfortunately, the applied RTE process in PSE is coarse-grained, i.e., often data are exchanged via E-Mail and integrated seldom and inefficiently as the RTE process is not well supported by methods and tools that facilitate efficient and secure data exchange. Thus, there is a need for frequent synchronization in a secure way to enable engineers building on a stable and baseline of engineering data. We build on Scrum, as an established agile engineering process, and security best practices to support flexible and secure RTE processes. In this paper, we introduce and initially evaluate an efficient and secure RTE process for PSE, augmented with agile practices, and discuss the identification and mitigation of security concerns and risks. First results show that the augmented RTE process can provide strong benefits from agile practices for the collaboration of engineers in PSE environments. Security practices can be added but need to be balanced well regarding sufficient mitigation of security risks and extra effort for engineers to ensure an overall benefit to both engineers and the management.