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Waterfall is great for projects that have predictable tasks with significant internal dependencies. Software is less predictable, and, with modularity and unit
by Zigurd 4y ago
Waterfall is great for projects that have predictable tasks with significant internal dependencies. Software is less predictable, and, with modularity and unit tests, has fewer hard dependencies that prevent other tasks from starting. A kanban board with simple task descriptions is far less overhead than recalculating a critical path method analysis for every change in a project (without much to gain from doing so).
Agile OGs will tell you Scrum is too-often a way of bureaucratizing Agile and making is safe (SAFe?) for managers who demand predictability. If you don't let a small-a agile approach emerge in a way that is appropriate to your project, in your organizational setting, you just end up with a different flavor of bureaucracy.
When planning and budgeting there is a lot to be said for traditional project management methods. They are more predictive than a spreadsheet full of task estimates. But if your team doesn't know why running a project off a Gantt chart fails so often, they won't know which parts of agility are most important to their project.
- lanstin 4y agoIf you want big wins, then what you are doing is going to have variance. All these solutions are new, and the data to make it predictable is not sufficient to predict, u less you just slow everything down to a pedestrian rate, succeed at predicting that, and then get replaced by some order of magnitude better competitor.
- commandlinefan 4y ago> the data to make it predictable is not sufficient to predict What's particularly ironic about the methodology obsession is that if a perfect methodology came along that could reduce software development into cookie-cutter assembly-line work then, while programmers would be reduced to minimum wage janitors, the managers that insist that WE'RE the problem because we can't do complex things in the blink of an eye would be reduced to spreadsheets.
- SpeedilyDamage 4y agoI think of small-a agile as a tool chest you rifle through to solve a problem you're encountering, but only once you've encountered it. You just have to be good at knowing what the problem patterns look like is the only trick to this, and not let something get out of hand when there's a ready-made tool available to fix the issue.