Agile as a methodology holds a great deal of promise; iterative development and the delivery of software to customers and stakeholders enables fast feedback and improvement which ultimately results in a better product.
But there’s often hesitancy in safety-related domains to pick up new methodologies. This is particularly where these methodologies aren’t necessarily endorsed by safety standards or regulatory organisations. Nonetheless, as software engineers, project managers and other communities of practitioners become used to working with Agile, it’s clear that the safety domain will also need to adapt its ways of working.
The IET’s Engineering Safety Policy Panel has produced a short flyer highlighting some of the key concepts and questions around Agile (www.theiet.org/Agile ). The flyer looks at the promises of Agile practices as well as considerations and questions for using it in safety-related environments. We hope the flyer is of value to senior / safety managers and industry practitioners, who need to understand the general principles and issues around products developed with Agile.
We’re now working on a longer paper that gives more detailed guidance on this subject. As such, we’d be very interested in your thoughts on the following questions, especially if you are a practitioner from a safety-related industry:
- Is your organisation considering adopting Agile for safety-related products, systems and services? If not, why not?
- What’s one key blocker you see to the adoption of Agile in the safety-related environment?
- What’s one key topic you would expect to see in any guidance from the IET on this subject?
Download the flyer for free: Agile in a safety-related environment