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This post was previously on the Pathfinder Software site. Pathfinder Software changed its name to Orthogonal in 2016. Read more.
I spend a fair amount of time talking to R&D directors and heads of innovation at medical device companies many of whom acknowledge feeling pressure to accelerate their product development efforts. Many are starting to extend their products with mobile, cloud and analytics software. In these areas, the pace of innovation can be significantly faster, and traditional players with 3 to 5-year product cycles are being threatened by more nimble players who can release products in as little as 6 months.
The more nimble players achieve this through streamlined processes that take advantage of agile and lean techniques and a high degree of automation.
Orthogonal is among a growing number of companies in the industry that have successfully used Agile on large-scale medical device software product development projects.
When it’s done right, using Agile can increase project velocity, quality, and maintainability. Done wrong, it can be as much of a mess (or more) as any other process.
In our case, there are a couple of keys to making it work:
Automation also has other benefits. For instance, it makes maintenance a lot easier. We do a lot of projects that incorporate mobile, web and server/cloud based technologies, and the underlying platforms are updated very frequently. Automation lets you see what, if anything, breaks based on your changes, and lets you fix them quickly. This can move your turnaround from weeks or months to days or hours, especially if you automate traceability.
I’m looking forward to hearing from others about what has worked, what hasn’t, where the challenges are, and where you should or shouldn’t use Agile.
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