> Most of what's planned falls down within the first few hours of implementation.
Not my experience at all. We know what computers are capable of.
My experience as well. Waterfall is like - let's think about where we want this product to go, and the steps to get there. Agile is like ADHD addled zig zag journey to a destination cutting corners because we are rewriting a component for the third time, to get to a much worse product slightly faster. Now we can do that part 10x faster, cool.
The thing is, at every other level of the company, people are actually planning in terms of quarters/years, so the underlying product being given only enough thought for the next 2 weeks at a time is a mismatch.
Agile isn’t a good match for a business that can only think in terms of effort and not learning+value. That doesn’t make agile the problem.
To get around the problem that deliverables took more than a few days, actual tasks would be salami sliced down into 3 point tickets that simply delivered the starting state the next ticket needed. None of these tickets being completed was an actual user observable deliverable or something you could put on a management facing status report.
Each task was so time boxed, seniors would actively be upbraided in agile ceremonies for doing obvious next steps. 8 tickets sequentially like - Download the data. Analyze the data. Load a sample of the data. Load all the data. Ok now put in data quality tests on the data. OK now schedule the daily load of the data. OK now talk to users about the type of views/aggregations/API they want on the data. OK now do a v0 of that API.
It's sort of interesting because we have fully transitioned from the agile infantilization of seniors to expecting them to replace a team of juniors with LLMs.
Sure there's a 3000 row excel file of requirements but during development the client still sees the product or slides outlining how the product works and you still had QA that had to test stuff as you made it. Then you make changes based on that feedback.
While Agile often feels like it's lost the plot. We're just going to make something and iterate it into a product people like versus figuring out a product people will like and designing towards it.
If you work in an environment where you definitely do know where you want the product to go, and the customer doesn't change their mind once they've seen the first working bits, then great. But I've never worked in that kind of environment.
A one page requirements document is like pulling teeth apparently.
That's an interesting observation. That's one of the biggest criticisms of waterfall: by the time you finish building something the requirements have changed already, so you have to rewrite it.
agile approaches are based on the quick implementations, redone as needed.
my favorite life cycle: 1> Start with requirements identification for the entire system. 2> Pick a subset of requirements to implement and demonstrate (or deliver) to the customer. 3> Refine the requirements as needed. 4> go to 2
The key is you have an idea of overall system requirements and what is needed, in the end, for the software you are writing. Thus the re-factoring, and re-design due to things not included in the sprint do not occur. (or occur less)
That’s not the point. The point is to end up with something actually useful in the end. If the artifact I deliver does not meet requirements, it does not really matter how fast I deliver it.
The reason waterfall methodology falls flat so often is not long delivery times, but ending up with completely the wrong thing.
I don’t know. The faster you deliver the wrong thing, the sooner you can discover your mistake and pivot.
> Not my experience at all. We know what computers are capable of.
You must not work in a field where uncertainty is baked in, like Data Science. We call them “hypotheses”. As an example, my team recently had a week-long workshop where we committed to bodies of work on timelines and 3 out of our 4 workstreams blew up just a few days after the workshop because our initial hypotheses were false (i.e. “best case scenario X is true and we can simply implement Y; whoops, X is false, onto the next idea”)
Every single reply in this thread is someone sharing their subjective anecdotal experience..
There are so many factors involved in how work pans out beyond planning. Even a single one of us could probably tell 10 different stories about 10 different projects that all went differently.
However the value of agile is in the learning you do along the way that helps you see that the value is only in 10% of the work. So you’re not comparing 100% across two methodologies, you’re comparing 100% effort vs 10% effort (or maybe 20% because nobody is perfect).
Most of the time when I see unhappiness at the agile result it’s because the assessment is done on how well the plan was delivered, as opposed to how much value was created.
But when I hammer out the first 30 minutes of code, I have that info. And if we just spent four 2-hour meetings discussing this design, it's very common that I after 30 minutes of coding either have found 5 things that makes this design completly infeasible, or maybe 2 things that would have been so good to know before the meeting, that the 8 hours of meetings just should not have happened.
They should have been a single 2 hour meeting, followed by 30 minutes of coding, then a second 2 hour meeting to discuss the discoveries. Others might be much better than me of discovering these things at the design stage, but to me coding is the design stage. It's when I step back and say "wait a minute, this won't work!".
There are costs to pouring out a cement foundation without thinking through how many floors your building is going to be in advance.
