Comment by jacquesm
3 hours ago
You have rediscovered the job of Software Analyst, which until the early 90's was a thing. Then that all got upended and we ended up with a mix between product owners, project managers and developers / devops but I think that that ignores the fact that Analyst is a different set of skills.
There is a lot of room to reevaluate the lessons of software development pre-web in the context of the current environment.
Like, if waterfall of a project can be done in 2 weeks, is it agile now?
> Like, if waterfall of a project can be done in 2 weeks, is it agile now?
Sure. The thing is, the waterfall guys would tell you it's impossible to do it in 2 weeks because you need to have written down everything first. "Thousands of pages" was the terms they used.
Agile guys would point you to the Agile manifesto which would lead you to "working code over documentation" and "people over process".
A 2 week period to go from initial spec to product in a user's hands to capture feedback and make changes from there is much closer to agile than to waterfall. In fact it's more or less exactly some older versions of Scrum (which didn't permit deviating from the planned sprint user stories midway through the sprint, instead changes influenced the subsequent sprint).
That doesn't do justice to either waterfall or agile.
I came up as a software requirements analyst before the weird transition between business analyst to product owner to product manager to technical product manager. But living in requirements for 15+ years really gave me a leg up on these “let’s go back to requirements!” efforts.
It always amazes me how bad the software world is at keeping lessons learned as learned, especially when compared to say engineering. It's as if every 20 years or so we throw away the books and reinvent it all from first principles, hopefully this time with fewer mistakes overall but usually we end up finding both new ones and re-do some old ones.
It's because software engineering, which deals with bits, evolves dramatically faster than other engineering disciplines, which deal with the physical world.
It’s almost as if we need to write some unit tests. For our profession.
It's almost like "move fast and break things" isn't such a good mantra.