Steel does not Sprint (or does it?): Enabling agility for cyber–physical systems through consistency preservation
Albert Albers, Anne Koziolek, Thomas Alexander Völk, Razieh Dehghani, Thomas R. Weber, Tilman Pfersdorff, Frederik Beck, Maximilian Beck, Katharina Bause, Tobias Düser · Journal of Systems and Software · 2026
Agile development promises responsiveness and faster feedback, yet its applicability beyond the development of software to cyber–physical systems (CPS) remains limited by physical constraints, cross-domain dependencies, and the need for planning stability. While previous work frequently suggests that consistency mechanisms support agility in such settings, this relationship has largely remained implicit and insufficiently explained. This paper explicates how consistency preservation and inconsistency management influence agility in CPS engineering. Drawing on a design science research approach, we derive an interdisciplinary network of influencing factors that makes explicit the dependencies between consistency mechanisms, organizational and technical conditions, and key agility outcomes such as responsiveness, transparency, and the realizability of development increments. To illustrate the explanatory power of this model, we apply model-based consistency preservation to an industry-motivated inconsistency situation from the development of a hybrid braking system using consistency preservation tools. By systematically maintaining the alignment of interdependent development artifacts across engineering disciplines such as software, electrical, and mechanical engineering (reflected in artifacts like SysML diagrams), cross-disciplinary dependencies in CPS development can be explicitly managed. This enables agile practices to be applied more effectively in physically constrained and interdisciplinary development environments. The case demonstrates how increased transparency of the current consistency state and automated change propagation can support faster feedback cycles and cross-domain coordination without undermining necessary planning stability. The results show that consistency preservation is neither an obstacle to agility nor a universal remedy, but a context-dependent enabling mechanism whose effectiveness depends on domain maturity, recurring dependencies, and organizational context.