The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile, 2nd Edition

30Agile Hardware Development

MUCH HAS BEEN SAID ABOUT APPLYING AGILE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES TO SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT, but comparatively little has been said about Agile hardware development. Joe Justice has been a pioneer in the area of applying Agile to hardware projects and has graciously given me permission to summarize some of his materials in this chapter. This entire chapter is based on Joe Justice’s work. Joe is a real thought leader in this area. He’s been working with Agile and Scrum for a long time and has been teaching Scrum Master and Product Owner training for about 10 years.

In his training, he recognized something I completely agree with that most Scrum Master training and Product Owner training simply focuses on the “mechanics” of how to do Scrum. The standard training doesn’t typically go into examples of how to apply it in different situations at all which is what is really important.

Instead of the typical approach of simply teaching the mechanics of how to do Scrum, Joe spends a very limited amount of time on that and goes much deeper into how to apply it in real‐world situations.¹

In his Product Owner class, he goes even further and breaks up the training into three sections:

• The first third of the training is on Scrum.
• The second third is on how to run a more advanced enterprise‐level Agile company.
• The final third is on how to run an Elon Musk company like Tesla which is very advanced.²

In this chapter, we will go over the general approach that Joe ...