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What are the top project management methodologies?

Is anybody using Agile Project Management methodologies for development of hardware products? How did you implement it? What system did you transition from? What problems did you run into?

  • Curious about not only tech hardware products, but really anything that is not a software product.

  • Answer:

    You dont exactly use Agile methodologies in hardware development. Let me see if I can explain a little bit. In most cases, unlike SW where you can develop and manage small/minor changes at a time, create sprints of relatively short duration , its really difficult to do the same in HW. HW is more developed feature by feature and is tracked on a continuous basis to see if enough progress has been made since sprint based time tables are unrealistic in HW implementation. Every attempt will be made to identify   smallest pieces of functional hardware that can delivered , this is not always possible. In most of the cases , team meets regularly  , checks if they are on target, does progress reviews and identifies and eliminates the bottle necks . As you can see, its not exactly waterfall (where its expected to build the entire HW at once) nor Agile. Also, in reality, you always have 3 teams (HW, Embedded and SW) working in parallel or slightly overlapping and each of these three has to be managed differently given the nature of their tasks and their dependencies on other teams. Briefly, this is what I do for the systems I architect . Once I have the system design and partitioned based on functionality, interfaces etc, I explore what are the best methodologies to track and implement. If there are clearly defined subsystems in SW which don't have any dependency on HW or Embedded, I try to manage it with Agile. Many times, SW can be developed much ahead than HW or embedded and I try to make sure the SW works and then embedded etc sothat I can isolate the issues once entire system is integrated. Embedded is often specific to HW or device under selection, so they have a dependency to  wait till the particular HW modules are developed. Sometimes we can use emulators or dev boards to make the embedded dev is independent of HW develop schedule and when it is possible, I try use Agile to certain extent or comeup hybrid methodologies. Let me know if you have any specific question or has any other doubts.

Kiran Bulusu at Quora Visit the source

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Pure hardware product development using Agile is happening now. When this question was asked there was already a growing body of knowledge from the work that WIKISPEED was doing to build a 100 mpg car using Scrum, extreme programming technical practices, and object oriented architecture. Since then a growing number of companies are adopting Agile into their hardware shops. Companies good at Agile in Hardware are shipping every week. They combine Lean thinking with Agile thinking.Implement Scrum as you would in a software organization. The rest you need to figure out for their context. The key difference between Agile and Lean is that Agile emphasizes reducing the cost of change, so improvements to product and process can occur easily. This is where you have to get creative with things like reconfigurable lines, 3D printing, etc.

Robin Dymond

The fact that agile methods are increasingly being applied in almost every segment of an industry, the PMI-ACP seems more and more relevant in the current business scenario.  Waterfall delivers the product at the end, typically in 6-18 months, while agile produces small iterations of production quality software, typically every 2-4 weeks!, demonstrates to customer and adapts to the product feedback. Once the product has minimum marketable features, customer releases to market i.e., shorter time to market (TTM) yielding better return on investment (RoI) In waterfall,Project Managercooks up the whole plan and get the work done by team. In agile, the team is self-managing i.e., the team does estimation, customer commitment, planning, scheduling, resource allocation, execution, monitoring, control and customer management!! Project manager role accordingly morphs to providing infrastructure, managing external stakeholders and removing team impediments. In short, we have empowered and motivated team. Agile believes Just Barely Good Enough (JBGE) documents i.e., the one line user story as requirement and code as living design document!! Instead, agile focusses on software engineering practices (like pair programming, test driven development, test automation, and continuous integration), collective code ownership, informal communication and continuous customer collaboration. Here are few articles that will provide you assistance in understanding agile methodology . I found them very useful . Hope it will be of great help to you too . http://www.greycampus.com/blog/project-management/top-3-agile-software-development-methods http://www.greycampus.com/blog/project-management/what-is-agile http://www.greycampus.com/blog/project-management/agile-building-blocks

Malak Nina

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