Scrum Agile methodology for Engineering?

Some days ago, I had an interesting chat with some colleagues about the goods and bads of Scrum Agile Methodology and its applications in engineering. 

In my professional life, I have used traditional (waterfall) project management methodologies, as well as Agile Methodologies, mainly Scrum, as I am Professional Scrum Master certified.

The traditional methodologies are based on a good definition of the product or service requirements upfront. Changes in the scope are allowed using Change Management, but Agile methodologies are more focused on those projects were not all requirements could be defined upfront and where changes could occur very often. Let’s say that Agile methodologies, like Scrum, are more adaptive to customers and market needs. 

Although Scrum is more focused on software development, it could be used for other sorts of projects, like engineering projects, but only if you could adapt your project to the Scrum framework, artifacts, and tools.

But one of the things that I most like of Scrum is how it is “release” oriented. With traditional project management, you define a product and work through all steps until you get the final product. With Scrum, you divide the product into parts that require less than a month (a Sprint) to be releasable. And after it, you continue developing new releases of the product. The god thing of this is that your time to market is shorter and you could build new releases based on the experience of the use of previous ones. 

Source http://www.agilenutshell.com

Obviously, you could not use Scrum in all sort of projects. There are projects that require a traditional approach and other that require Agile methodologies. 

Some people say Scrum is outdated. It is not, as well as traditional PM is not outdated either. We are in a world were incredible engineering and software developments are produced every day based fortunately on both PM methodologies.