By: Rolf V. Ostergaard
If you read about Scrum from the software world, you learn how important it is to make the sprint demo as close as possible to the real product in a realistic user scenario. Some obsess over it to a point, where this becomes a problem for adapting Scrum to hardware development. I want to change that – a demo need NOT be the working product, in order to be valuable and useful.
In device development, where products often combine custom hardware, test systems, embedded software, FPGA/ASIC code etc. etc., making a demo after the first 3 week sprint that looks anything like the real product seems dead impossible. I agree, but that does not mean you shouldn’t try or can’t benefit from Scrum.
You can easily get many – if not all – of the benefits of Scrum simply by adopting a broader definition of what a good sprint demo is. I know this is very difficult envision at first, but take a look at what we considered good demos along the way in some example projects.
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