I think spending a lot of time on DevOps may skew my interpretation of different trends and articles.  To me it seems that everyone is trying to reinvent and “lean out” there design to engineering flow to be faster, more iterative, and generally more responsive to conditions in our rapidly changing world.  Faster is, of course, relative depending on what you are talking about.  I recently saw this article on the MIT Technology Review about DARPA (always a source of cool advanced engineering ideas) undertaking a rapid approach for getting a new tank designed and built.

Article here:  http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509311/darpa-wants-to-remake-manufacturing/

The article thematically addresses concepts like ensuring a common understanding of the design among contributing engineers and moving manufacturing knowledge closer to the design stage so it is actually a part of the design thinking.  My DevOps skew made the immediate association of how similar this was to the collaboration implicit with Agile and DevOps.  Everyone needs to know the architecture and Ops needs to be involved directly with development while development is underway to ensure rapid Continuous Delivery cycles.  It’s a good perspective on how applicable these concepts are on a much broader scale and in varied industries.

I figure that if these guys can do it with metal in the context of a tank, it has to be possible with whatever software or virtualization problem I”m dealing with.  Though it does make me want better toys for our office.  I have to believe that DARPA has cooler Nerf guns…