August 16 2020 at 11:00AM
Agile Values in Hardware development
News
“The most obvious difference between hardware and software is that Hardware Components can’t be undone, twisted, adapted and adjusted at the same rate, or minimal impact to cost and time as Software.”
The Agile Manifesto prescribes 4 Agile Values and 12 Principles. In this article, Let’s look at the Agile Values and the implications for hardware product development. According to the Manifesto, Agile values the items on the left in each Value more than the items on the right however, for Hardware Development it is not always true:
1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools: Hardware teams deal with Mechanical components, Electronic Components, assembly, research, supply chain, service, quality, regulatory, configuration control, and many more. In order to combat this increasing complexity, good processes and tools are essential for keeping everyone on the same page. In Hardware development, we need both Individuals & interactions and processes & tools to achieve our goals.
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation: A working hardware product is certainly of very high value. However, delivering a Hardware product with changing requirements takes longer and has a higher cost than in software. With larger, multi-disciplinary teams necessary for hardware development, documentation of decisions and changes is typically more valuable. This includes documentation about the design, the factors driving our design decisions, and the results of those decisions. Knowledge is often better transferred through documentation when face-to-face transfer is not possible.
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation: This Value translates most directly to hardware development. Despite best attempts, we still cannot predict the future or read our customers’ minds very well in either software or hardware. Therefore, customer feedback is essential.
4. Responding to change over following a plan: As we may welcome changing requirements, we must balance these changes with the cost of delaying our project launch. The time between ‘design’ and ‘test’ in hardware development is larger. This makes the delay we incur with hardware changes larger, which increases the cost and reduces the economic value of a change. As a result, fewer of the changes we would like to make turn out to be profitable. There is no doubt hardware product development projects can benefit from the application of some parts of Agile. However, due to the differences of hardware product development vs. software development, Hardware Development projects ideally require a hybrid approach that includes not just Agile but practices from Theory of Constraints, and Lean etc. as well.
CONCLUSION
While the Agile Values do apply to hardware development, we don’t place as much emphasis on the Values on the left at the expense of the Values on the right. This is largely because the cost of achieving the values on the left is larger in hardware projects.
Reference:
www.playbookhq.co
