AgileVox Scrum for Hardware

Scrum for Hardware? A Groundbreaking Experiment at Thermo Fisher Scientific Shows Promise documents an early experiment applying Scrum to the development of a fully developed, saleable hardware product rather than a software product or prototype. Led by Kevin Thompson, Ph.D., the pilot involved a nine-person hardware engineering team developing a new analytical equipment product at Thermo Fisher Scientific. The organization wanted greater transparency into project status, improved collaboration across technical functions, and a project-management process suitable for a regulated environment.

The case study describes how Scrum was adapted to the realities of hardware development. Unlike software, hardware products cannot easily add functionality late in development, working components may take months to produce, and meaningful testing often requires multiple components to be assembled before the system can be evaluated. The team therefore adapted its approach to requirements, deliverables, Release Planning, and estimation while retaining the core Scrum framework.

Among the lessons learned were that hardware Product Owners may also be members of the engineering team, hardware requirements generate many technical deliverables rather than primarily user-facing stories, Release Planning is particularly important because of hardware's longer learning cycles and higher cost of change, implementers often perform the testing of technical deliverables, and time-based estimation can work better than Story Points for teams composed of highly specialized engineers.

The experiment produced encouraging results. Team members reported improved collaboration, greater shared understanding of the overall product, stronger participation in technical decisions, and better visibility into project status. Managers also valued the resulting improvement in predictability, while Release Planning helped the team maintain focus on larger product goals rather than individual engineering activities.

The case study provides a practical example of how Scrum can be adapted for hardware development without simply treating hardware as software with longer lead times. It illustrates both the challenges of applying Agile in a physical-product environment and the organizational and process changes that can make an Agile hardware approach effective.