[xyzzy_plugh]

I think the author is mostly right. Embedded development does not work well with agile. Hardware does not work well with agile.

You're dealing with vendors, supply chains, hardware revisions, manufacturing pipelines... It's classic waterfall. Agile is a recipe for burnout here.

[detaro]

The problem is much more about reasonableness than about "waterfall" or "agile". Having everything "planned" beforehand and forcing it through is also terrible for embedded projects if there are holdups - and there are going to be holdups.

My favorite is always "but we defined 3 years ago that it'll do this-and-this fancy 3D thing on this screen, it's a requirement!" "well then maybe you should have selected hardware that can do fancy 3D. Let's talk about what we can change that still is good." "But its a requirement!".

Or on the hardware side, there is a "plan" that can't cope with the fact that suddenly there is a really good reason to do a hardware revision that nobody planned for. (e.g. because its 2021 and suddenly a bunch of parts just isnt available)

Of course totally freewheeling nothing-planned also causes equivalent problems, as does expectations that anything can change within 2 weeks. On the other hand on plenty projects I've worked on the "agile" requirements on the Yocto person are more among the lines of "we'd like this additional software added to the image please".