Scrum is big in software and it’s slowly creeping into hardware development. To me this is good news because Scrum would be a transformative for hardware teams. In an industry that relies heavily on the big bang, iteratively coming to potentially shippable checkpoints, as a team would do with Scrum, would be a welcome change. It would give users and customers early access to product (or some version of a product depending on the technology involved), there’d be increased opportunities for feedback and the narrowed sprint-to-sprint focus on feature subsets would propel a significant improvement in quality.

Yes, Scrum would be great for hardware teams… unless, of course, we strip out the practices and objectives that make it effective and bend the rest around practices we already use without actually changing much. That would be less great. Continue reading →