Agile Engineering Initiative

Welcome to the Agile Engineering initiative of the Agile Alliance

Our purpose is to surface the techniques already emerging among engineers who work closely with software, and give visibility to help spread these practices. The scope covers any kind of programmable technology – PLCs, FPGAs, ASICs, ladder logic, and firmware. We will do this by posting short descriptions of techniques that we receive from you. Anyone can play a role in the development of agile engineering practices by contributing an Agile Engineering tip.

Here are a couple of examples:Example 1, Example 2

These Agile Engineering Tips should be:

• Proven in practice
• First-hand description of Problem, Action, and Result you achieved
• Written assuming your reader is a peer
• Granularity sufficient for reader to duplicate your experience
• About 1 or 2 pages in length

The process for getting your Agile Engineering tips published here is simple. Just tell us about it on this form and we’ll communicate with you through email to resolve any questions – ours or yours – and that’s it.

Review Criteria

This program is primarily for spreading proven techniques that help implement Agile principles in programmable hardware and firmware. A Tip can come from industry or academia, but should be written by the person who actually implemented it. Tips will be reviewed for:

• being in scope (the charter of AA says it’s a software organization, so our scope is programmable technologies of all sorts. For the present time, other kinds of engineering are outside scope, but we’d like to hear from you if you want to discuss this.)
• being clear and detailed enough that a person of similar background could implement the tip. – length. Prefer 2 pages max but will consider some variation. If it’s very long, perhaps it should be 2 or more tips.
• not overly commercial. Please don’t send disguised advertisements for your product. It’s ok to mention specific tools, and even vendors but we’ll use our judgement to keep the content to be relevant to practitioners, by screening out things that appear to be advertisements.

We encourage the use of visual elements – a photo of your lab set-up or a device layout diagram is good to have. Several images can be part of one tip.

Help spread the word!

• Invite your co-workers to submit tips
• Tweet about this program using #AgileEngineering
• (sharing buttons on the website for Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• badge to put on your site or blog –>

Why this program?

We want to make it easy to offer and find Agile Engineering technique tips. Each of us has our own reasons for coming to this view.

Nancy Van Schooenderwoert

I’ve met engineers in the past few years who had very useful tips to share and when I’d ask “Why not submit a conference session on that?” they’d say their company won’t approve going, or they don’t want to write a full paper on it, etc. My feeling is that by making it easier for these ideas to coalesce and become more visible, I can help this community grow. So I proposed this program to the Agile Alliance, and I invited Neil to work on it with me. There’s one further thought I want to put out there. To the electronic engineers, technicians, and other engineers I want to say that hardware practices fitting the Agile principles have been in use for decades. I borrowed ideas from my circuit design work when I was developing Agile embedded software techniques in the 1990’s. So this initiative is not pretending that the software people are teaching agility to hardware people – all ideas, new or old, that help programmable technology be more Agile are a fit here.

Neil:

For several years now, I’ve been doing what I can to help promote agile development practices within the hardware community. The agile manifesto gives us a more complete view of product development than most teams consider now. The best part is that we can rely on years of agile development experience from the world of software. They’ve already done a lot of the hard work when it comes to experimenting with new techniques and practices. Now it’s our turn to pick, choose and innovate further. Having a program with Agile Alliance is a great opportunity to work together and make it happen!