It ignited on a meetup on Liberating Structures. While having a Rote and and a beer on the rooftop, I met Christoph. “What are you doing?” is what he asked me. “My job is to make sure that our mainframe hardware does what it supposed to do – with respect to function and performance – before we build it”. “So do you develop using agile methodologies?”. My button was pushed and I started talking about our agile transformation with building crossfunctional teams, creating our own interpretation of DevOps given that we only want to build our chip ones in an ideal case.
Christoph stopped me, I guess he realized I could go on and on talking about this and he invited me to an exchange about Agile Hardware Development with participants from Bosch, Trumpf and IBM on the Schillerhöhe in Stuttgart. After very fruitful discussions ww decided not only to meet again to deepen some of the subjects we were only able to scratch the surface but also found a meetup group to connect people around Stuttgart working or interested in agile hardware development.
Said and done – I would have never believed how many people joined the group within a week and the number kept growing. While Christoph was already experienced, I got pretty excited to organize our first meetup.
Finally on Feb 5, we arrived at the Connectory in Stuttgart . And more than 30 participants did show up!!! After an initial very fun game to meet each other, we found the group is a very mixed one with hardware developers, software developers, students, entrepreneurs. Christoph told his inspiring story of how they do agile development in hardware in the area of driving assistance @ Bosch followed by me about our agile hardware transformation in our mainframe system development @IBM.
What we were really hoping was that people bring in their own subjects to discuss. Since Christoph and I are both enthusiastic about Liberating Structures we used 1-2-4-all to create the topics for the following barcamp.
And as always you can trust the team. They came up with great topics such as “how to align on an agile mindset?”, “positiv experiences – great practices in agile hardware development”, “scaling agile in hardware” and “how to create architectures for hardware to support agile hardware development”.
I’ll add the artefacts uncommented, to not overlay them my own opinion. These are the results of an amazing barcamp. People were fully concentrated and heavily engaged in the discussions.
Scaling Agile Hardware Development Challenges, Tips & Tricks
How can we establish an agile mindset in the team?
Sucess stories in Agile Hardware Development
And Flo prepared a session based on liberating structures.
Architecture for Agile Hardware Development
At 21:22 we ended the playback and it felt like nobody really wanted to leave yet. Everybody kept discussing. It was amazing.
I am looking forward to the next meeting, we received overwhelming positive feedback and a great ideas for the next meetup.
Thank you very much Christoph Reinicke for the great collaboration!
Join our meetup group Agile Hardware Development Stuttgart!
See you soon at the 2nd agile hardware development meetup in May/June!
Bodo
Comments
Fantastic team. We need to witness more success stories to overcome the thought that Agile is applicable only for software 🙂 I am interested to see the outcomes of few topics like:
How to align on Agile mindset and positive experiences 🙂 Please share it with me.
Connectory is such a nice place to be, especially for meetups! We had the pleasure to perform a Kick-Off event for 2 days in a row in this location, just amazing..