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.

CSM Course At Our Premises

Jeff Sutherland and Jens Oestergaard are going to give a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) course at our premises on 3.-4. Dec. 2007 in Espoo, Finland. It's an open class, so if you are interested check out if there's still seats available.

Scrum Simulation Rocks

Last week I gave an introduction to agile development and Scrum for a global project organization in Shanghai, China. After the lunch on first day it was time for 59min Scrum simulation. I have written about bad experiences when trying to achieve too much, so it was back to the basics.

There were participants from Finland, China, and Mexico. We used the product backlog for Family Cookbook. Only addition to original Scrum simulation was the use of relative complexity estimations on product backlog items. This time it worked. Estimating the tasks in numbers gave birth to discussion on whether something is simple, or not, not just dividing an item into tasks. Some items were also soon identified to be too large to fit in one 14 minutes Sprint. Team was immediately forced to seek for collaboration with Product Owner.

On retrospective the main thing experienced was the time pressure. I do not see this as a bad thing, it is just the beginning of understanding the discipline needed for time-boxed development. Time pressure will decrease when the team builds trust and improves estimating.

Everyone valued the exercise and though that it was a good lesson. I might consider adding a separate exercise for planning and estimating before the final Scrum Simulation. With this early experience I do not think that I will ever try meaningful work inside the simulation again. The difference was so clear.