8 ms·
What Killed Waterfall Could Kill Agile
- joshwa 16y agoWHY is this posted as an embedded scribd doc? -- EDIT: full text posted here: https://gist.github.com/710960 https://gist.github.com/710960
- MikeTaylor 16y agoWhy is anything, ever?
- RodgerTheGreat 16y agoA friend of mine who briefly worked for Scribd once tried to convince me that Scribd enhances the experience of working with PDFs online because it offers better navigation features than PDF viewer plugins. I'm not convinced, but perhaps it makes it easier to understand the Scribd users?
- Qz 16y agoThat's that fantastic posterous usability working its magic.
- javery 16y agoI think Uncle Bob had to fax it to his nephew who posted it for him.
- alanh 16y agoI got a “old flash player” message. The fallback (download) link was a .docx. Not much better… considering it’s all text, I can’t see the reason it’s not, you know, HTML!
- philwelch 16y agoShit, it's a document? I just saw Flashblock come up and assumed it was a video.
- frossie 16y agoOkay, interesting post that left me with a "Well, yes and no" response. The accusation is, that the "scrum master/coach" role in agile has gone from being an in-team activity to being a project management activity. I do think that is true. I also agree that Agile has become a buzzword that companies are adopting without truly understanding it (in the vein of http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/ http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/ ) But the reason Agile won't be killed is the same reason Waterfall hasn't been killed: it's the optimal choice in some scenarios. (And before you sneer at Waterfall, go build me a nuclear power station with Agile).
- nevster 16y agoI think the biggest problem is the naming. When I heard the title Scrum Master, I envisaged someone that was a master, someone with training - and yes, someone who runs the project. I recently read Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn and now understand it's just a role title - it's the person tasked with making sure scrum practices are used - regardless of how much scrum experience that person has - and is distinct from the project manager role. It really needs to be renamed - it's like a bad variable name.
- gcheong 16y ago"(And before you sneer at Waterfall, go build me a nuclear power station with Agile)" Or a sudoku solver.
- newt 16y agoMeh? I build a suduko solver one night on my own in 2-3 hours. I've seen agile do much more than that. What are you trying to say?
- mifrai 16y agoI think it's referring to the sudoku TDD blog series that happened a few years back. Essentially, someone tried to implement a sudoku solver using TDD - and after several posts, never managed to finish. Peter Norvig then came along and wrote a short elegant implementation. Some use this to say TDD - which has ties to agile - doesn't work. But most people conclude that TDD isn't a silver bullet and you have to know about your problem domain before diving in. Here's someone elses' blog post which includes links to both sets of posts: http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-solvers.html http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...
- hartror 16y agoWaterfall is dead? I missed that memo!
- jemfinch 16y agoWaterfall was DOA. People have just been trying to bring it to life for forty years.
- kenjackson 16y agoExcept for the fact that almost everything we use was built with waterfall. From the CPU/GPU to the OS to my browser and most of my apps... almost all were likely built with waterfall. Outside of a few websites, I don't think the full on TDD/Agile blitz has built much.
- AndrewDucker 16y agoYou'd be surprised. A lot of companies are using Agile nowadays. And finding it more efficient than waterfall.
- jemfinch 16y ago> almost all were likely built with waterfall. Stop using weasel words. Find real, confirmed examples or keep mum. "Likely" isn't worth a rebuttal.
- kenjackson 16y agoHow about the worlds most populat OSes, Windows, Linux, BSD. Mozilla, Chrome browsers. Android, iOS, and WinCE. Word, Excel, Quicken, TurboTax, Photoshop, iLife.
- newt 16y agoIn what way is chrome's development waterfall? http://adtmag.com/articles/2010/07/30/is-google-going-agile.aspx http://adtmag.com/articles/2010/07/30/is-google-going-agile.... And firefox? http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/3860226/Mozilla-Firefox-Gets-More-Agile-with-Lorentz.htm http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/3860226/Mozilla-Fi... Those were the first 2 that I googled. I'm sure that some of them are not agile, most likely by default - e.g. the older Microsoft ones, before MS or anyone else discovered agile. But honestly, all you are doing is throwing out names of popular programs without any idea if they are agile or not, and then claiming success on the ones that no-body refutes. After that behaviour, the burden of proof is on you - back each one up with references or go away. It would be interesting if you found major projects that evaluated both agile and waterfall and still chose waterfall or deliberately changed to a less agile process, instead of the other way. Rather than just software written before the people involved knew what agile was.
- jay_kyburz 16y agoI've always used the word "Agile" to describe a project management style that can move quickly and respond to change. Becoming a certified scrum master and rigidly following the rules of SCRUM seems counter to this. Isn't the first line of the manifesto "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" Having said this, I should add that I believe even agile teams require strong leaders with a clear vision for the product, I'm not a fan of democratic software development.
- RodgerTheGreat 16y agoThis premise is a false dichotomy. Agile and the Waterfall development cycle are not binary opposites. If you take a waterfall and break it up into a number of smaller milestones, you start to get something that resembles the bare bones of Agile. If you look at a single Agile sprint, you will see a miniature Waterfall. Finding the balance point between these extremes for a project and a team is what makes "agile" work.
- zb 16y agoNo, no, no. What you're describing is Barry Boehm's Spiral Model from the early 1980s. If you look at a single Agile sprint you should not see a miniature waterfall. In Agile, activities like requirements, design, coding and testing happen at the same time. This is the essence of Agile, and what separates it from the Spiral that came before.
- kenjackson 16y agoHow is it possible that you get requirements and code at the same time? Like I literally start writing code, while at the same time have a meeting with the customer to figure out if they want an accounting system or a CMS?
- zb 16y agoBecause the customer has no freaking idea what the requirements are at the start of the project. That's always been the failure of Waterfall. You've never been writing code and suddenly thought of something that needed to be added to (or removed from) the system? Seriously?
- kenjackson 16y agoI'm not sure how what you said is incompatible with waterfall/spiral. You can certainly add/remove/change requirements, but you don't start coding until you have at least a first pass on some subset of requirements.
- mkramlich 16y agoI hit upon a pretty simple process a couple decades ago and it seems to work pretty well and doesn't require any fancy books, titles, lingo, paradigms, papers, etc.: 1. observe/listen/read/question/collect-information 2. think (analyze, hypothesize, decide, etc.) 3. code (techically it is 'do', and the actual action varies by field, context and goal) 4. goto 1
- newt 16y agoNice. What percentage unit test coverage do you generally get? How do you deal with regressions introduced by bug-fixes? With technical debt? With requirements change and scope creep? How much refactoring do you do? How big a team does this approach scale to?
- jaxtapose 16y agoAgile has a similar problem to Waterfall. Business is a bunch of cheap pricks who don't understand the value of doing things right.