Re^2: An interesting rebuttal of "agile"

[chromatic]

If I were developing embedded systems, real-time systems, safety-critical stuff or anything under a strict regulatory regime, things might be different.

One of my favorite stories is from Nancy Van Schooenderwoert's Embedded Extreme Programming: An Experience Report (PDF) and Taming the Embedded Tiger: Agile Test Techniques for Embedded Software (PDF) papers, which describe a novice programming team writing real-time software for farming equipment using agile techniques. Their delivered bug rate was astonishingly low, for example.

[samizdat]

The second link didn't work, chromatic, but the paper is available in the articles directory with the first paper. Well worth sleuthing out, too, thank you very much! Our teams here at D3ll do heavy embedded Linux work, and we constantly have evolving hardware as a constraint, usually with completely different schedules.

For example, right now I'm helping a junior engineer explain to the project core team that there's a hardware defect blocking our progress. No matter how hard you try, software can not force a pin high when there's a leakage through a bias diode that drags it below 2 vdc.

I think my big issue with Agile is integrating Agile teams with other players in our product development game. We'll be working those issues here, because the benefits of Agile are obvious. Our company as a whole releases a phenomenal number of products, and they go out the door mostly working right. Our challenge is that we need to do even more, with less overhead, because our markets are developing and technology is changing rapidly and we're under beancounter pressure to reduce operating expenses. Agile and XP have lots of good ideas we can use, but we still have to think through (for one example) how to integrate incremental software / firmware releases with publishing Users' Guides in multiple languages. Minor little details like that need to be worked out satisfactorily, and there are a lot of them.