Agile Insights

Swarming and Cross-Functional Teams are two of the most important concepts in the adoption of Scrum for software-development work. They play out very differently in the worlds of software and hardware development.

Hardware and software engineers are similar in that they both make things. It is obvious that they employ different skills in their work. What is not so obvious is the implications of the differences in their skills when it comes to collaboration within teams.

From an Agile perspective, the development of embedded software is not difficult, provided proper team definitions exist. This post addresses collaboration and cross-team dynamics to identify the optimum strategy for embedded software development.

Introduction to the Thermo Fisher Scientific engagement.

Lesson #1: In hardware development, the Product Owner is often a team member.

Lesson #2: In hardware development, Release planning is essential.

Lesson #3: Scope decomposition for hardware products is typically driven by components and subsystems.

Lesson #4: Hardware products accrete components, not functionality.

Lesson #5: User Stories play a much smaller role in hardware development than they do in software development. Technical Stories become the dominant mechanism for describing Sprint-level work.