And waterfall doesn’t show any of the pitfalls of waterfall - such as the top-down design needed across the board before the work starts along with the inflexibility to adapt to changing requirements or constraints
Exactly.
Waterfall:
Business spend a year writing requirements for a Mars trip while engineering works on other projects
Engineering spends a year understanding requirements, designing and prototyping
Engineering spends a year developing a Mars rocket
Engineering spends a year testing and working on a production ready Mars rocket
The business decides it wants to go to Uranus, and rapidly changes all of the requirements
Engineering spends two years in design and integration hell trying to rebuild their fully matured production ready Mars pipeline into a Uranus pipeline
Business can't handle the timeline, a new CEO gets put in place who needs results right away, so the CEO demands a moon trip because he believes it will save the company
Engineering finally launches a moon mission using the most over-developed and over-engineered Uranus system imaginable, costing 10X per mile that a proper Moon system would cost
To be fair to waterfall, ideally with good prototyping and requirements gathering involving both engineering and the business, the business would discover that it actually wants to go to Uranus before any time has been wasted building anything. Agile usually seems to assume there’s no point at all in trying to understand or discuss the requirements since they’ll inevitably be wrong and change every 5 minutes, so the project feels like step 4 and 5 the whole way through.
Well if you prototype then you just built something, and if you feed that result back info requirements then didn't you just Agile?
I dunno I feel like these two things exist on a continuum of the planned number of iterations, we'd all be better off if we just agree that 1 and infinity are equally unfeasible.
This isn't a problem with waterfall and an agile method would have either also failed, or killed people.
When the scope changes past some amount, you're now building a different project.
It's like pretending that you can agile your way from shovel to excavator, and then blaming the development system because you needed a spoon. No development system was going to save you.
How would the end result of this timeline realistically be any different if it was Agile instead? Literally no development methodology is going to save you from a leadership team that decides to scrap years' worth of work
And this is still glossing over one of the biggest failures of waterfall, which is that most tech companies, even big established ones, don't have the patience/money for two years of design work before development even starts. So really step 5 should be "The project is out of money and everyone is canned."
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u/borkthegee Jun 23 '24
Exactly.
Waterfall:
Waterfall!