mgeerts
Computer
- Nov 10, 2009
- 34
I work for a company that produces custom hardware/firmware solutions for customers in ANY industry. One day i may be working on a plasma cutter, another day a hospital bed, another day farm equipment.
I constantly find that our projects run into the same problems:
-We didn't understand the requirements when we wrote the quote
-The customer didn't even understand their own requirements when asking us to quote
-As the project continues, the customer wants changes weekly/daily either providing incomplete descriptions or contradicting what they have previously requested.
These things make completing a project in the quoted time within the quoted budget impossible. We regularly lose money on engineering time in the hopes of making it back in production profits (we reserve the right to produce what we design so customers are locked in with us).
Not only is this a waste of time and money, but it is massively demotivating to me and the other developers.
Agile project management has been the buzz of the 21st century. The premise being that you take a budget and a timeline and chop it up into segments, then make only promises for the first segment with the intention of re-evaluating the customer needs before proceeding to the next segment.
I presented this method to my Engineering Manager and the response is that it is impossible to do Agile development because there is hardware design involved. I shake my head in disbelief.
As I see it, collecting hardware requirements and producing a board, then proving that the board can work in the environment is simply the first iteration. The next iteration would be, for example, a basic user interface outline (customers never know what the UI is to look like), then work on features from there in stages. Seems simple to me. Less risk, more opportunity for change, smaller tasks.
Please reply back with your experiences in Agile design in this sort of field (short design cycles [6-16mo], different customers/industries).
Also, please reply back with any resources that I may find to convince my manager that "waterfall" is not the only method in the world that works with hardware (the evidence tells me it does not work!).
I constantly find that our projects run into the same problems:
-We didn't understand the requirements when we wrote the quote
-The customer didn't even understand their own requirements when asking us to quote
-As the project continues, the customer wants changes weekly/daily either providing incomplete descriptions or contradicting what they have previously requested.
These things make completing a project in the quoted time within the quoted budget impossible. We regularly lose money on engineering time in the hopes of making it back in production profits (we reserve the right to produce what we design so customers are locked in with us).
Not only is this a waste of time and money, but it is massively demotivating to me and the other developers.
Agile project management has been the buzz of the 21st century. The premise being that you take a budget and a timeline and chop it up into segments, then make only promises for the first segment with the intention of re-evaluating the customer needs before proceeding to the next segment.
I presented this method to my Engineering Manager and the response is that it is impossible to do Agile development because there is hardware design involved. I shake my head in disbelief.
As I see it, collecting hardware requirements and producing a board, then proving that the board can work in the environment is simply the first iteration. The next iteration would be, for example, a basic user interface outline (customers never know what the UI is to look like), then work on features from there in stages. Seems simple to me. Less risk, more opportunity for change, smaller tasks.
Please reply back with your experiences in Agile design in this sort of field (short design cycles [6-16mo], different customers/industries).
Also, please reply back with any resources that I may find to convince my manager that "waterfall" is not the only method in the world that works with hardware (the evidence tells me it does not work!).
