we have done this in quite a couple of companies where things like functional safety or other requirements had to be met. agile sadly gets a bad rep (as does devops) for the way it is rolled out in its grotesque perverted style in large orgs (wagile etc that are nothing but a promise to useless middle/line managers in large orgs not to fire them, or "dev(sec)ops" being condensed into a job title - if that is you, shoot your managers!).
if you increase test automation and get better visibility into risks already during the requirements management phase (e.g. probably you're doing D/FMEA already?) then nothing stops you from kicking these lazy-ass firmware hardware engineers who are scared of using version control or jenkins to up their game, and make your org truly "agile"). Obviously it's not a technical problem but a people problem (to paraphrase Gerald M. Weinstein) and so every swinging dick will moan about Agile not being right for them or DevOps not solving their issues, while in reality we (as an industry) are having the same discussion since the advent of eXtreme programming, and I'm so tired of it I want to punch every person who invites an Agile coach simply for not having the balls/eggs to say the things everyone already knows, it's infuriating to the point I want to just succumb to hard drugs.