Bridging the Chasm between Agile and Embedded Systems Development

There is often a deep divide within companies that develop embedded cyber-physical systems, such as cars or medical devices:
On the one hand, traditional hardware development with its slow development cycles still shape the organization’s development processes. Here, linear and sequential thinking is deeply ingrained in the culture: “getting it right the first time” leads to big upfront design work; and worse, hardware-software silos and late integration prevail. In safety-critical domains such as automotive or medical, this is often reinforced by regulatory standards that think in terms of phase-gate processes. As a result, products are delivered late and, due to a lack of feedback, often do not meet market needs.
On the other hand, there is a growing need for rapid response, whether to new market requirements or disrupted supply chains. Also, developing innovative products requires experimentation and rapid feedback to master their complexity.
Agility addresses these needs, but attempts to introduce agile approaches in hardware-focused organizations often end in pseudo-agility in a waterfall corset due to the deeply entrenched processes. Realizing the potential of agility requires a fundamental shift in both development processes and architecture.
In our session, we will share specific practices from our experience, such as:
- Extending the notion of “flexible architecture” from software development to system- and hardware development to enable experimentation and adaptability
- Introducing agile development practices in hardware development
- Establishing a system model to bridge the gap between software and hardware developers and improve their collaboration
- Preferring automatable and easily integrable open-source tools over expensive, proprietary tools that hinder collaboration
We'll show how these architectural and organizational changes enable a more responsive, truly agile systems engineering process.