My Hardware and Co-Design talk at Scrum Gathering

Couple of weeks ago I attended my first Scrum Gathering in the city of light, Paris. On the first day I was offered an opportunity to present my Hardware and Co-Design talk. You can find the abstract below, and slides are available here.

Summary

Agile methods are gaining foothold in embedded software development. Embedded software is not developed in isolation, but it has dependencies to hardware development. The system development is facing the demands of ever increasing amount of change and learning. Agile methods aim at helping in these challenges. This talk summarizes authors observations on hardware development teams using Scrum during the past 10 years. Teams have varied in terms of disciplines involved and collocation.

Come to this session to get the practitioner’s view on using Scrum beyond embedded software development.

Description 

Agile software development is getting more and more attention also in embedded software development. Embedded system development on the other hand requires different engineering disciplines working together towards a shared goal. When embedded software development begins using agile methods it triggers a need for change also in other disciplines. Agile development emphasizes continuous learning through experimenting and collaboration instead of following a detailed up-front plan. Agile embedded software team expects different behavior in system co-design.

In addition to the above, product development in general and not only software development is facing the demands of ever increasing amount of change and learning. Change happens in several areas, such as technology, competition and marketplace. This is what agile methods aim at tackling. This implies that new product development in general could benefit from knowledge created on agile development.

This presentation summarizes authors observations on hardware development team members and hardware teams using Scrum and agile methods during the past 10 years. Team configurations range from collocated cross-disciplined team (electronics, printed circuit board, mechanics and embedded software) to globally distributed teams of different disciplines. Several real-life products will be used as examples.