alt Hacker NewsWaterfall can work great when: 1/ the focus is long-term both in terms of knowing that she company can take a few years to get the thing live but also that it will be around for many more years, 2/ the people writing the spec and the code are largely the same people.
Agile was really pushing to make sure companies could get software live before they died (number 1) and to remedy the anti-pattern that appeared with number 2 where non-technical business people would write the (half-assed) spec and then technical people would be expected do the monkey work of implementing it.
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I spent my career building software for executives that wanted to know exactly what they were going to get and when because they have budgets and deadlines i.e. the real world.
Mostly I’ve seen agile as, let’s do the same thing 3x we could have done once if we spent time on specs. The key phrase here is “requirements analysis” and if you’re not good at it either your software sucks or you’re going to iterate needlessly and waste massive time including on bad architecture. You don’t iterate the foundation of a house.
I see scenarios where Agile makes sense (scoped, in house software, skunk works) but just like cloud, jwts, and several other things making it default is often a huge waste of $ for problems you/most don’t have.
Talk to the stakeholders. Write the specs. Analyze. Then build. “Waterfall” became like a dirty word. Just because megacorps flubbed it doesn’t mean you switch to flying blind.
No.
Agile core is the feedback loop. I can't believe people still don't get it. Feedback from reality is always faster than guessing on the air.
Waterfall is never great. The only time when you need something else than Agile is when lives are at stake, you need there formal specifications and rigorous testing.
SDD allows better output than traditional programming. It is similar to waterfall in the sense that the model helps you to write design docs in hours instead of days and take more into account as a result. But the feedback loop is there and it is still the key part in the process.