Multi-discipline agile development and reliability and maintainability
Christopher C. Zanotti, Andrew J. Kaylor, Kristine L. Davidsen · 2017
In today's competitive market place the need to reduce cost and increase speed in development require exploring a different approach than the traditional waterfall method of hardware development. The Waterfall method consists of a series of stages that are completed sequentially, once a stage has been completed, developers can't go back to the previous stage - not without scratching the project and starting over. In order to remain competitive, companies developing hardware are using Agile methodologies to help keep up with the accelerating rate of change. Scrum is a simple and flexible Agile methodology that provides the ability to respond to changing requirements, increase productivity, and enables rapid and flexible development cycles, with greater collaboration and reduced costs & defects. Integrating a Reliability And Maintainability (RAM) Scrum Team as part of the Agile product development can help deliver reliable and maintainable hardware quicker, and at lower costs providing a competitive advantage. In summary help enable transformational change. Be open to process change and work your RAM agile process model. Don't impose current waterfall processes on Scrum, they will not help. Be supportive and review the team's work products during the Sprint timeline in which they are being developed. Don't expect to see a lot of charts for reviews and table tops and don't direct the team to do additional work or direct how it should be done. Look at the team Scrum boards to understand what is going on and help remove impediments. Staff the team's needs with permanent solutions and take Scrum training to understand, enable and support the changes. Finally don't see failing as bad, especially if we fail early and learn from it.