to reiterate on parents endorsement for agile and the point that you seem to be taking issue with: nothing in Agile says you can't run final acceptance tests or integration tests before shipping.
we have done this in quite a couple of companies where things like functional safety or other requirements had to be met. agile sadly gets a bad rep (as does devops) for the way it is rolled out in its grotesque perverted style in large orgs (wagile etc that are nothing but a promise to useless middle/line managers in large orgs not to fire them, or "dev(sec)ops" being condensed into a job title - if that is you, shoot your managers!).
if you increase test automation and get better visibility into risks already during the requirements management phase (e.g. probably you're doing D/FMEA already?) then nothing stops you from kicking these lazy-ass firmware hardware engineers who are scared of using version control or jenkins to up their game, and make your org truly "agile"). Obviously it's not a technical problem but a people problem (to paraphrase Gerald M. Weinstein) and so every swinging dick will moan about Agile not being right for them or DevOps not solving their issues, while in reality we (as an industry) are having the same discussion since the advent of eXtreme programming, and I'm so tired of it I want to punch every person who invites an Agile coach simply for not having the balls/eggs to say the things everyone already knows, it's infuriating to the point I want to just succumb to hard drugs.
to reiterate on parents endorsement for agile and the point that you seem to be taking issue with: nothing in Agile says you can't run final acceptance tests or integration tests before shipping.
This is exactly right. I work in a highly regulated space, and we have been working in an Agile framework for awhile now. There are two iterations baked into every release cycle (at the end) for final regression testing. That cycle will re-run every test case generated during the program increment, plus additional test cases chosen based on areas of the application that were touched during development.
On top of final validation, we also have an acceptance validation team that runs full integration tests after final validation is complete.
I would very much like to understand how it might be possible to improve on the conventional workflow for the work I am involved in. But I am not quite clear what agile as you implement it means, in contrast to v-model and waterfall, and how it provides advantages (I am guessing accelerated schedule?) to the process.
Can you refer me to any available online case studies etc, or provide me some more detail?
The sectors I work in we integrate off the shelf hardware such instruments, valves etc, we don't manufacture from components as such.
I recommend you learn more about SAFe agile https://www.scaledagileframework.com/
. They all have their merits, but I find this works up to complex organizations, and can simply drop the things that are not worth it for smaller businesses.
we have done this in quite a couple of companies where things like functional safety or other requirements had to be met. agile sadly gets a bad rep (as does devops) for the way it is rolled out in its grotesque perverted style in large orgs (wagile etc that are nothing but a promise to useless middle/line managers in large orgs not to fire them, or "dev(sec)ops" being condensed into a job title - if that is you, shoot your managers!).
if you increase test automation and get better visibility into risks already during the requirements management phase (e.g. probably you're doing D/FMEA already?) then nothing stops you from kicking these lazy-ass firmware hardware engineers who are scared of using version control or jenkins to up their game, and make your org truly "agile"). Obviously it's not a technical problem but a people problem (to paraphrase Gerald M. Weinstein) and so every swinging dick will moan about Agile not being right for them or DevOps not solving their issues, while in reality we (as an industry) are having the same discussion since the advent of eXtreme programming, and I'm so tired of it I want to punch every person who invites an Agile coach simply for not having the balls/eggs to say the things everyone already knows, it's infuriating to the point I want to just succumb to hard drugs.