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Thursday 30 June 2016

Three increments later

We are now in the middle of our fourth program increment, and it is already hard to remember the old way of project planning and tracking. SAFe mission accomplished? No! As I wrote earlier, this is just the beginning of our agile journey. We are still learning how to limit our WIP more effectively, and it will take time and effort to move to truly incremental development. Incremental planning is easier to achieve.

In our business, a verification and validation period for the finished product is a must, but how to make this final V&V more lightweight without compromising product quality and safety? AAMI TIR45 provides some answers for software, but less has been written about agility in system and hardware development for medical devices.

Are we on the right track with SAFe? We have now asked our people three times if they would recommend the new way of working to a friend or colleague. So far, the answers have been more positive after each increment. I’ll let you guess the scale.