Gianluca De Solda
Great question.
And highly relevant to hybrid and industrial contexts.
Your experience touches on a common challenge: applying Agile principles in environments that traditionally follow waterfall or sequential models, like SCADA development.
Even though you discovered Agile after your project, here are some ways Agile could have enhanced your context:
- Incremental Value Delivery:
You could have structured the work around short iterations (e.g., 2–3 weeks), each delivering tested updates to components or features (alarms, dashboards, PLC tags, etc.).
This helps to respond faster to evolving customer needs.
- Backlog-Driven Prioritization:
A Product Backlog with customer requests, compliance requirements, and integration needs could have made priorities more visible and negotiable across stakeholders, especially when managing multiple machine types.
- Frequent Feedback Loops:
Short sprints with demos to customers or internal stakeholders (engineering, automation, QA) would have enabled earlier detection of mismatches, reducing the risk of rework during late stages of SCADA deployment.
- Systematic Change Management:
Change Requests (CRs) in SCADA are often reactive.
An Agile approach could have brought proactive grooming of the backlog allowing the team to prepare, refactor, or simulate scenarios before urgent deployment.
- Hybrid Governance:
For the master SCADA project, a hybrid model (e.g., Scrum + Stage-Gate or Scrum + V-model) might have preserved compliance and validation checkpoints while leveraging Agile for iteration and responsiveness.
Pro tip:
Agile doesn't mean ignoring the technical constraints of automation and control systems.
It means structuring work to enable earlier insight, better stakeholder engagement, and adaptive planning, even in rigorous environments.
Thanks for sharing your experience
It's great to see more practitioners bringing Agile thinking to engineering-heavy domains.
