alt Hacker News“Agile” doesn’t mean that you release the first iteration, it’s just a methodology that emphasizes short iteration loops. You can definitely develop reliable real-time systems with Agile.
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> “Agile” doesn’t mean that you release the first iteration
Someone needs to inform the management of the last three companies I worked for about this.
A physicist who worked on radiation-tolerant electronics here. Apart from the short iteration loops, agile also means that the SW/HW requirements are not fully defined during the first iterations, because they may also evolve over time. But this cannot be applied to projects where radiation/fault tolerance is the top priority. Most of the time, the requirements are 100% defined ahead of time, leading to a waterfall-like or a mixed one, where the development is still agile but the requirements are never discussed again, except in negligible terms.
I think people mean so many different things when talking about agile. I'm pretty sure a small team of experts is a good fit for critical systems.
A fixed amount of meetings every day/week/month to appease management and rushing to pile features into buggy software will do more harm than good.
SCRUM methodology absolutely prioritizes a "Potentially Shippable Product Increment" as the output of every sprint.
I would differentiate between iterative development and incremental development.
Incremental development is like panting a picture line by line like a printer where you add new pieces to the final result without affecting old pieces.
Iterative is where you do the big brush strokes first and then add more and more detail dependent on what to learn from each previous brush strokes. You can also stop at any time when you think that the final result is good enough.
If you are making a new type of system and don’t know what issues will come up and what customers will value (highly complex environment) iterative is the thing to do.
But if you have a very predictable environment and you are implementing a standard or a very well specified system (van be highly complicated yet not very complex), you might as will do incremental development.
Roughly speaking though as there is of course no perfect specification which is not the final implementation so there are always learnings so there is always some iterative parts of it.