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Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

Your absolutely right, and with a modular system design it can make it easier to plug in iterations of individual components. But at some point early in the design you need to lay out how the modules will work together, i.e. do we use CAN? 24V power or 48V? All that can be changed as well but at some point it gets complicated!

For a simple project all of that can be managed iteratively.

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> All that can be changed as well but at some point it gets complicated!

Not everything has to be changed, that's just a strawman.

But not every detail has to be nailed down at the beginning either.

The idea behind Agile is to reduce risk. If there is no risk of the bus system changing on you, there's no harm in fixing it right at the beginning.

But if there is a chance it might, you'd do well to have systems in place which enable you to react to changes with a minimum (though non-zero, of course) amount of pain.

All the more reason to use an agile approach! The only reason you would be making those major changes is in the face of new information: a change in requirements, an unforeseen challenge, etc.

It's impossible to foresee those all in advance—better to adopt a system that is structured to anticipate them. "Unknown unknowns" are a fact of life, no matter how disciplined we believe we are with our preparation.

The same is true with software, unless you suggest that Agile will change the implementation language with every sprint...

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