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It's more a classic example of the situation that agile methodologies seek to avoid. The biggest thing Agile tries to do is minimize up-front planning. The re

It's more a classic example of the situation that agile methodologies seek to avoid. The biggest thing Agile tries to do is minimize up-front planning. The reason for that is that you have the absolute least knowledge available to inform your decisions at the beginning of a project, so decisions made early on are massively more likely to be poor ones. Worse, you tend to get locked into them because other components in the system were designed around these decisions and that creates major impediments to change. F-35 had reams and reams of design decisions made long before anyone started assembling the thing. To an Agile team that's the worst possible thing you can do. You decide you're going to do X long before you have any idea how long X will take or what it will cost or how well it might work. OK sure, yes, you've written down some numbers on paper, but to be blunt that's just blowing smoke up your own ass. It's inevitable that the end result of so carefully specifying the requirements up-front would lead to a virtually unbounded schedule and budget. By contrast, an agile project's schedule and budget are theoretically unbounded, but you're supposed to strive to always be at a point where it's possible to ship on short notice so the practical reality (not always accomplished) should be that it's always possible to fix one or the other at a defined point by saying, "OK that's enough, let's ship." Or you can even pull the plug on the whole project if you decide it's just not working, and that's actually a realistic option because by delaying decisions you haven't encumbered yourself with a mountain of contracts and financial obligations. Which isn't to say you could get away with using Scrum or Kanban on a project like this. Just that the problems you're talking about aren't really emblematic of Agile so much as the problems Agile is designed to fix.

Gravityloss 12y ago
They did have the JSF competition with flying prototypes.
RogerL 12y ago
"move fast, break things" is not a viable approach to aircraft design. Lead times on hardware is years. That helmet - how long would it take you to make one? You can't just tell that team don't sweat it, we are going to change requirement on you every two weeks. And you can't tell the jet team wait 3 years for this helmet, then start designing the system. Military development is so far outside the realm of agile that it make so sense to compare (source: I've done both). The things agile people struggle with I just scoff at. Building large, physical, state of the art systems require planning, requires schedules, requires rework, requires huge teams, requires reams of documentation, and so on. You can't agile your way through that stuff. Planning doesn't lead to unbounded schedules. It leads to compromise. We have 3 years, 85 million dollars. We need an architecture (assume, say, a flight system for a helicopter, something I have done and delivered). I'm sorry, but very early in you have to choose your processors, distributed network (you need to be fail safe, so multiple redundancies are needed), and more. Then you can buy that, or simulate that; either has costs, but your engineers something to work with. Many have very strict environmental concerns - limited weight, has to fit in this bay, needs radiation hardening, and so on. I can't wait until the last 3 months to make this decision, sorry. Somebody has to build these, deliver them. They need to design and build out the logistics chain - how do I retrofit the existing fleet? HOw do I do repairs? How quickly can I spin up my factory line if you need spares? Do we buy 3x the units you need now, or plan on JIT. This is just one tiny nit of a tiny detail that needs to be decided and tracked. Don't forget instruction manuals, plans to train the maintaince workers, training the workers, training the pilots, building a school for the next people coming through in two years. I have a meething. I could type for several hours. There is nothing agile about this problem.

Gravityloss 12y ago

They did have the JSF competition with flying prototypes.

RogerL 12y ago

"move fast, break things" is not a viable approach to aircraft design. Lead times on hardware is years. That helmet - how long would it take you to make one? You can't just tell that team don't sweat it, we are going to change requirement on you every two weeks. And you can't tell the jet team wait 3 years for this helmet, then start designing the system. Military development is so far outside the realm of agile that it make so sense to compare (source: I've done both). The things agile people struggle with I just scoff at. Building large, physical, state of the art systems require planning, requires schedules, requires rework, requires huge teams, requires reams of documentation, and so on. You can't agile your way through that stuff. Planning doesn't lead to unbounded schedules. It leads to compromise. We have 3 years, 85 million dollars. We need an architecture (assume, say, a flight system for a helicopter, something I have done and delivered). I'm sorry, but very early in you have to choose your processors, distributed network (you need to be fail safe, so multiple redundancies are needed), and more. Then you can buy that, or simulate that; either has costs, but your engineers something to work with. Many have very strict environmental concerns - limited weight, has to fit in this bay, needs radiation hardening, and so on. I can't wait until the last 3 months to make this decision, sorry. Somebody has to build these, deliver them. They need to design and build out the logistics chain - how do I retrofit the existing fleet? HOw do I do repairs? How quickly can I spin up my factory line if you need spares? Do we buy 3x the units you need now, or plan on JIT. This is just one tiny nit of a tiny detail that needs to be decided and tracked. Don't forget instruction manuals, plans to train the maintaince workers, training the workers, training the pilots, building a school for the next people coming through in two years. I have a meething. I could type for several hours. There is nothing agile about this problem.