> > "You’d never hear anyone say, 'We help mechanical engineers be agile. That would be silly. And I mean that in the worst possible sense of the word".
This quote is silly.
To me, agile is just good engineering practice, applied to software. Of course mechanical engineers apply its principles, and have for decades before the term Agile was coined.
And as such, this practice is far older than software.
The Apollo space programme is my favourite example: the ultimate goal remained fixed (man/moon/before end of decade), but all steps of the way were discovered and redefined over the programme's course.
Mission objectives were changed depending on what was learned, often even in flight.
This was a very nice and agile (and sensible) approach, regardless of what it was called.