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Comment by robocat

1 day ago

Contracts that lock in a waterfall process.

At last they were not trying to use agile!

I do wonder how much of the backlash against agile is driven by people who never experienced waterfall

  • Either one of fine as long as you are doing it and not having it done to you. In the latter case, waterfall will crush your soul under a stack of binders, while agile is death by a thousand cuts.

    • That’s a really excellent insight! I’m going to use that!

      Another common pitfall seems to be engineering teams choosing agile when the business engagement model is waterfall. This puts you in the unfortunate situation of trying to change requirements without being able to get paid for those changes.

  • The key issue appears to be how long it took to realize that existing infrastructure would present a showstopping cost. In practice, waterfall and agile are virtually indistinguishable in their ability to anticipate such issues early - they can, but doing so depends on factors independent of the differences in methodology.