All through the agile era I wrote detailed specs for projects and then followed an agile process. The most successful parts of every project were the ones that we were able to spec best even when they diverged significantly from the original spec.

You don't plan to follow the plan. You plan in order to understand the whole problem space. Obviously no plan survives contact with reality.

We never left waterfall in the end. Working with and for dozens, collaborating with probably a hundred software companies in different scales, every single one said:

We do agile

Guess what? Every single one of them was doing waterfall.

Their agile included preplanning and pre-specifying the full spec and each task, before the project kicked off. We'd have meetings where we'd drill down into tasks, folks would write them down so detailed that there would be no other way than doing that. Agile would be claimed, but the start date, end date, end spec and number of developers was always concrete.

Sometimes, the end date was too late, so a panic would ensue. Most of the time, the date was too late because developers had "unknowns" which then had to be "drilled down and specced so they wouldnt be unknowns". Sometimes, nearly 50% of the workweek was spent on meetings.

A few times, a project was running late - so to make sure we are _really_ doing it agile, we'd have morning standups, evening standups, weekly plannings, retrospectives, and backlog refinement. It would waste the time, and the "unknowns" aka "tickets to refine" were again, as always, dependant upon the PM/PO/CEO's wishes, which wouldn't get crystallized until it was _really last minute_.

One customer wanted us to do a 2 year agile plan on building their product. We had gigantic calls with 20+ people in them, out of which at least half had some kind of "Agile SCRUM Level 3 Black belt Jirajitsu" certificates.

To them, Agile was just a thing you say before you plan things. Agile was just an excuse to deal with project being late by pinning it on Agile. Agile was just a cop out of "PM didn't know what to do here so he didnt write anything down". Agile was a "we are modern and cool" sticker for a company.

And unfortunately, to most of them, agile was just a thing you say for the job, as their minds worked in waterfall mode, their obligations worked in waterfall mode, companies worked in waterfall mode, and if they failed their obligation to the waterfall, their job would go down one.

So while we were doing the Agile ceremonies, prancing around with our Scrum master hats, using the right words to fit into the Agile™ worldview - we were doing waterfall all along.

And after 15 years, I'm not even sure - did agile really ever exist?

Sort of, but the downside of waterfall was you build the wrong thing and waste a shitload of time rewriting it.

When rewriting the entire codebase is very quick and cheap, why bother iterating on small components?

waterfall is not the sole purveyor of written docs

distributed teams do well when proposals, decision, etc, are written down, and can be easily found and referenced

it doesn't mean docs are frozen in time and can't be patched like code

I read that as "the business caring about what the spec says will never change" rather than "the spec will never change".

waterfall doesn’t mean writing down decisions

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