Scrum Teams, Swarming, and Hardware Kevin Thompson, Ph.D. Chief Scientist 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. Swarming Defined Swarming is a particular strategy for assigning the members of...
Agile, Scrum and “Hitting the Date” Our clients develop both hardware and software products. Their development work happens over time, and always involves some concept of a date by which the work needs to be accomplished. The idea of a date-driven schedule is not new, of course. I imagine the pyramid builders in ancient Egypt...
Agile Development for Medical Products By: Kevin Thompson, Ph.D. – Chief Scientist, cPrime One of my most memorable encounters with Agile development of medical products occurred in 2011. The company’s software product improved access to patient medical information by aggregating data from multiple sources. I read the engineering group’s internal process documentation during my flight...
Embedded Software and Agile Hardware Development Author: Kevin Thompson, Chief Scientist The worlds of hardware development and software development merge when companies develop integrated products that contain both hardware and software. We see this in high-technology products ranging from personal fitness-trackers to rockets. While some of the software that is associated with such devices can...
What is Integrated Product Development? By:Kevin Thompson, Ph.D. – Chief Scientist, cPrime A major challenge in the development of advanced-technology products is the integration of the software and hardware-development activities. Traditionally, companies develop large, up-front designs for both aspects of the produce, define interfaces between them, and begin development of the product. Integration and...
A Walk Through Agile Hardware: Post 2: By:Kevin Thompson, Ph.D. – Chief Scientist, cPrime Scrum Team Definitions in Agile Hardware and Software Environments The organizational ‘building block’ of our approach to Agile development of hardware and mixed hardware-software products is the Scrum Team. Each Scrum Team plans and executes its development work according to...
A Walk Through Agile Hardware: Post 1: What is Agile Hardware? Kevin Thompson, Ph.D. – Chief Scientist, cPrime The phenomenal success of the Scrum framework, as an approach to organizing and conducting software-product development, is now well known. Many words have been written on the topic (some of them by me), and many more doubtless...
What is Agile Hardware Development? By:Kevin Thompson, Ph.D. – Chief Scientist, cPrime Can an Agile process be used for hardware development? Would it bring to hardware development the same benefits it does to software development? Suspecting that the answers to both questions were “Yes,” but unsure of the details, cPrime partnered with TCGen to investigate....
Comparing and Contrasting Hardware & Software Development By:Kevin Thompson, Ph.D. – Chief Scientist, cPrime We all know what Agile is and what software development means, so let’s start by defining what we mean by hardware and hardware development. “Hardware” refers specifically to electrical or electro-mechanical devices, which often contain firmware or embedded software. For...
Agile Hardware Lessons Preview By:Kevin Thompson, Ph.D. – Chief Scientist, cPrime The word most people would expect to follow “Agile” is “Software,” not “Hardware,” but we are finding that the Agile techniques pioneered in software development can work for hardware development, as well. This should not be a surprise. While Agile processes were first...