3 ms·

Without wanting to make this unnecessarily personal, I’m genuinely curious to know what sort of work you were doing at the time and how long ago that was. Anecd

Without wanting to make this unnecessarily personal, I’m genuinely curious to know what sort of work you were doing at the time and how long ago that was. Anecdotally, I wrote my first code for money about 30 years ago and have been a developer by profession for well over 20 at this point, and I’ve never encountered anything like it. Even working on firmware or device control software, where you tend to know more of your requirements early on because they are dictated by the physical equipment involved, the process has always been incremental and changes in requirements have always happened along the way and been incorporated accordingly. Of course that’s just my own personal experience; I’m not disputing that yours might have been very different, just a little surprised.

Jtsummers 5y ago
About 15 years ago, aircraft safety systems at that point. One area where Waterfall is almost justifiable, but most of the other projects (in the same office) did not use Waterfall because (as that project demonstrated) it was crap. V-Model or Iterative & Incremental (slow-motion Scrum) were used with much greater success on all other projects. Success as in, they were rarely late by more than a rounding error (days, maybe a couple weeks). When they were late by larger margins the issues causing the delays were discovered early and were almost always requirements issues or hardware issues (that is, the former was partly on us, the latter never was). I've seen Waterfall used on other projects since then including a major information system that resulted in about $1 billion of waste, fortunately I've only been adjacent to them not on them. The billion dollar waste relied on (as Waterfall often does) late integration, none of the pieces worked together even though everyone built everything per the spec they'd been given. If you've not encountered it, that's great. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
- Chris_Newton 5y ago
  Fair enough. Perhaps a better position would have been that a choice between Agile and Waterfall is often presented as a (false) dichotomy.

Jtsummers 5y ago

About 15 years ago, aircraft safety systems at that point. One area where Waterfall is almost justifiable, but most of the other projects (in the same office) did not use Waterfall because (as that project demonstrated) it was crap. V-Model or Iterative & Incremental (slow-motion Scrum) were used with much greater success on all other projects. Success as in, they were rarely late by more than a rounding error (days, maybe a couple weeks). When they were late by larger margins the issues causing the delays were discovered early and were almost always requirements issues or hardware issues (that is, the former was partly on us, the latter never was). I've seen Waterfall used on other projects since then including a major information system that resulted in about $1 billion of waste, fortunately I've only been adjacent to them not on them. The billion dollar waste relied on (as Waterfall often does) late integration, none of the pieces worked together even though everyone built everything per the spec they'd been given. If you've not encountered it, that's great. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Chris_Newton 5y ago
Fair enough. Perhaps a better position would have been that a choice between Agile and Waterfall is often presented as a (false) dichotomy.