They develop their software in a waterfall like method because they develop their hardware the same. These are still core engineering companies that don't fully value software.

I asked one of these companies about security, apparently the major governments insist by law on weak encryption and they only have to stand up to 15 minutes of hacking... Pretty terrible right?

so "waterfall == bad and agile == good".... is that your point?

I would beg to differ... I've got pretty extensive experience of both and can say for sure that there is a negligible difference between the two as far as productivity goes.

That view is against popular opinion, but the only thing that really makes a difference is the commitment and intelligence of the people on the team... not the development process.

Also.... agile development is a less-good fit with hardware development... and the embedded software that goes on the hardware has to fall in line with that.

I've also had good experience with both. For me waterfall is perfectly fine if you don't have a hard deadline and agile is great for reducing risk (from what I've experienced).

I know agile and hardware doesn't go too well together and software of course is told by management to be more agile (because some manager heard it's great). The customer expects fixed incremental feature delivery (which they measure your performance on and scale your bonus with) and somehow as a software engineer you have to be agile in step with the waterfall process.

I think in general agile is better for software and waterfall is better for hardware - the problem is somehow they have to go together. It's not the best to say the least - often shipping with errors and bugs.

You realize that the concept of agile development was based on concepts practiced by the auto industry, right?

Not the American auto industry. You're thinking about Toyota not Ford.

The American auto industry has been practicing lean manufacturing techniques for quite some time now.

I think the companies themselves do, but they do an extreme amount of outsourcing too. I'm speaking from experience obviously, maybe it's a bad example.

Do you know for a fact that they do develop their software in a waterfall like method? I somehow doubt that a bit. At least they publicly say:

"Volkswagen Group IT consistently uses agile workstyles and intensive cooperation with universities, technology partners and Volkswagen Group departments to develop digital solutions."

http://www.volkswagenag.com/content/vwcorp/info_center/en/ne...

Of course, cars do have a lot of legacy (not least because of inertia caused by regulatory processes) but I think they do a bit of what they say.

Worked for a vehicle company, it's "agile" as long as it fits within the limitations set by waterfall.

I guess this is a point people will argue for days, all I can say is I have been there. There is strong emphasis on incremental feature delivery with little risk management. It usually came down to engineers pulling magic wands from somewhere and soothing the software into a workable state.

Perfect.

Haha, that's a funny description of waterfall which more or less matches the agile process at my bank.

Having worked on VW Software Projects i can assure you they drank all of the scrum koolaid.

How did hardware and software work together to iterate on a product? Or did they outsource it?

Didn't agile (or a least scrum) start from car manufacturers ?

http://the-agile-pmo.org/?p=54

It doesn't mean adoption was far reaching even if it did.