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"Agile works for web services, for small apps, but that’s it. Anything larger, or more complex, needs planning, thought, and design. And often needs refactoring

"Agile works for web services, for small apps, but that’s it. Anything larger, or more complex, needs planning, thought, and design. And often needs refactoring." I hope you discover the flaw in this logic sooner in your career than later. I'll start with a hint: You are misreading the Agile manifesto. All successful teams and companies - Agile or not - do planning, thought, design. And the Agile community (which came out of the Smalltalk community) also invented refactoring (in the disciplined sense, along with the first Refactoring IDE). Here's another hint: very few actively run systems in financial markets/brokerages were written with a waterfall method since the mid 90s. Not all were developed with great agile either, but let's just say they were "incremental and iterative". These are complex systems. They're not designed for 8 months on paper. "And in any serious development, where your code is going to run critical systems for decades, you can’t just work agile." This is somewhat true, assuming you have stable requirements. But almost no software, even for complex systems, runs for decades without an update. It just doesn't happen anymore except in the most constrained environments (space exploration, signal/control systems in dark territory, etc.) If your career trajectory is working for the military building weapons guidance systems, or an FDA manufacturer building blood pressure monitors, you also may come close to this ideal. But note even companies in mission critical healthcare, like Philips, are adopting cloud, open source, and agile in their next-generation health management systems that integrate with their MRIs and CT scanners.

kuschku 11y ago
And I can tell you that even some cloud software, like the Elektronische Gesundheitskarte was developed with Waterfall. Often you have to design software interacting with dozens of other entities, all who are going to write software interacting with your system. And your system is supposed to be able to run for years or decades with minimal maintenance. Agile is far more suited for web apps, or small mobile apps, which can be constantly updated.
- rjspotter 11y ago
  Healthcare.gov was also a healthcare application developed waterfall style and was an enormous failure on launch day because of it's interactions with 3rd party systems.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    And now imagine Healthcare.gov was Agile and its API would change every month completely. And then imagine how every insurance would complain and how, after 2 or 3 months, everyone depending on healthcare.gov would have stopped supporting it because after the third rewrite of the parts of their software interacting with healthcare.gov’s API they’ve gone mad. Every time you interact with third parties you have to provide stable interfaces.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > And now imagine Healthcare.gov was Agile and its API would change every month completely. Most methods that get the "agile" label attached to them focus on managing change by organizing work in such a way that, outside of externally driven changes that the organization can't control (which have the same effect regardless of development method) the parts that are done don't change much after they are released, to avoid widespread breaking changes. So I don't see the point here, or how it connects to Agile.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        If the parts that are done don’t change much, it’s not Agile. Agile is if no piece of your software can ever be called "done" because you are constantly changing things to be able to react to the market, as the market always changes. If your software has clear requirements, has a point when it is done, and only requires minimum maintenance after that, you aren’t writing agile.
        arclyte 11y ago
        "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
- kelrien 11y ago
  Actually that is incorrect. The Elektronische Gesundheitskarte was developed with "V-Modell". V-Modell, now V-Modell XT is the mandatory process for projects run by the german government.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Which is an expansion of Waterfall. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Systems_Engineering_Process_II.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Systems_...
    - kelrien 11y ago
      If you read the description of v-modell carefully, you would have realized that v-modell isnt a strict process and does not define in which order certain steps have to be made. Before tailoring (which can be used to create an agile process as much as waterfall btw) it just tells you WHAT has to be done and not HOW it has to be done. The order and iterations of each step is defined during the tailoring step.

kuschku 11y ago

And I can tell you that even some cloud software, like the Elektronische Gesundheitskarte was developed with Waterfall. Often you have to design software interacting with dozens of other entities, all who are going to write software interacting with your system. And your system is supposed to be able to run for years or decades with minimal maintenance. Agile is far more suited for web apps, or small mobile apps, which can be constantly updated.

rjspotter 11y ago
Healthcare.gov was also a healthcare application developed waterfall style and was an enormous failure on launch day because of it's interactions with 3rd party systems.
- kuschku 11y ago
  And now imagine Healthcare.gov was Agile and its API would change every month completely. And then imagine how every insurance would complain and how, after 2 or 3 months, everyone depending on healthcare.gov would have stopped supporting it because after the third rewrite of the parts of their software interacting with healthcare.gov’s API they’ve gone mad. Every time you interact with third parties you have to provide stable interfaces.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > And now imagine Healthcare.gov was Agile and its API would change every month completely. Most methods that get the "agile" label attached to them focus on managing change by organizing work in such a way that, outside of externally driven changes that the organization can't control (which have the same effect regardless of development method) the parts that are done don't change much after they are released, to avoid widespread breaking changes. So I don't see the point here, or how it connects to Agile.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      If the parts that are done don’t change much, it’s not Agile. Agile is if no piece of your software can ever be called "done" because you are constantly changing things to be able to react to the market, as the market always changes. If your software has clear requirements, has a point when it is done, and only requires minimum maintenance after that, you aren’t writing agile.
      - arclyte 11y ago
        "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
kelrien 11y ago
Actually that is incorrect. The Elektronische Gesundheitskarte was developed with "V-Modell". V-Modell, now V-Modell XT is the mandatory process for projects run by the german government.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Which is an expansion of Waterfall. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Systems_Engineering_Process_II.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Systems_...
  - kelrien 11y ago
    If you read the description of v-modell carefully, you would have realized that v-modell isnt a strict process and does not define in which order certain steps have to be made. Before tailoring (which can be used to create an agile process as much as waterfall btw) it just tells you WHAT has to be done and not HOW it has to be done. The order and iterations of each step is defined during the tailoring step.