In the project seminar “Agile Development of IoT Solutions for Smart Homes,” students gradually transformed an analog espresso machine and its accompanying coffee grinder into a connected system between 2024 and 2026. The result was a series of concepts and functional prototypes that monitor and adjust the brewing process and automate it all the way to creating personalized specialty coffees.

The format was supported by the interdisciplinary composition of the teams. In the project groups, bachelor’s and master’s students from mechanical engineering and industrial engineering worked together, contributing expertise in design, mechatronics, information technology, and business administration. It was precisely this mix that made the task realistic: Anyone developing a connected product must keep technical feasibility, usage scenarios, and practical implementation in mind simultaneously—and do so by communicating with people who view the problem from different perspectives.

In terms of content, the groups went through a typical four-phase product development process for mechatronic systems: analysis, potential identification, conceptual design, and specification. The starting point was a set of predefined use cases. At the end of each phase, the teams presented their interim results in milestone reviews, had them evaluated, and defined the next iteration.

The work was structured using the Scrum framework. The teams organized themselves into sprints and assigned specific roles such as product management, methodology development, and design. In the department’s project lab, they experimented with sensors and actuators, rapid prototyping, Arduino programming, and low-code and no-code tools, and tested both digital and physical prototypes in short feedback loops. Accompanying seminars and workshops covered the fundamentals of digitalization, the IoT, and agile product development; throughout the entire project, the groups were mentored by experts in project management and agile product development.

By the end of the course, participants were able to contextualize the core principles of agile IoT development and the design thinking approach and to evaluate their strengths and limitations in a well-reasoned manner. Above all, however, they not only became familiar with the Scrum framework but also applied it in a real technical development project, complete with all the friction, prioritization conflicts, and course corrections that come with it. This experience of testing agile methods under real-world conditions and in mixed teams was the module’s primary learning objective.

Incidentally, the department’s barista skills also noticeably improved over the course of the module.