I like how you've said it here, but one thing that scrum doesn't have in it is relief from your professional duty as an engineer. If a system needs to be desig

I like how you've said it here, but one thing that scrum doesn't have in it is relief from your professional duty as an engineer. If a system needs to be designed in a particular way, do so. That's how long it takes and that's why in planning you discuss how it will be designed. The design of how you're going to build the system is taken care of before the task is split into easily digestible bits that meet a definition of ready. If you need to build it before you know how to build it, scrum allows for research spikes into this. A focused, timeboxed interval that so you have the ability to estimate the actual difficulty of work to be completed.