| > However, I still think waterfall is the only approach when trying to design a hardware product. Electronics require pretty specific requirements up front before you design and order boards, obviously mechanical tooling can be even more expensive. I disagree, having taken part in agile embedded development. Sure, it looked a bit different from pure-software, but the same underlying principle of short iterations applied. Our definition of "short" was a bit different, but still... And yes, you may have some "very specific" requirements, but you may also have some "pretty loose" ones -- just like software. > But... I think there are lots of ways to do quick experiments and tighten up the feedback look even with robotics or electronics. Breadboards and development kits can be used as initial electronics prototypes. 3d prints help test a mechanical concept See, there you go. The core idea behind Agile isn't to have sacrosanct two week sprints (or even to have sprints in the first place), it is to close as many feedback loops as you can as quickly as you can. Whatever that means in practice. This has been good engineering practice for longer than software exists. I read that the Mercury space project created their software in half-day "sprints". Back in the '60s, on punch-card machines (I guess). |