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Waterfall vs. Agile: Battle of the Dunces or A Race to the Bottom?

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The major software methodology wars since the mid 1950’s. Someone was wrong on the Internet, so here we go… In a recent HBR article, It’s Time to End the Battle Between Waterfall and Agile , the author sets up a false premise: There is a war between Waterfall methodology and Agile. The war must end. And finally, you can combine the approaches to get the best of both worlds. This sounds good, but the article is based on a misunderstanding of both Waterfall and Agile. Also, there is no war between Waterfall methodology and Agile. There can’t be, because Waterfall methodology does not exist! Waterfall is a name for large projects that failed in the 1960’s. Waterfall was never a methodology, but a failure to apply the methodologies that existed back then. As I will show towards the end of this article, at least one of the “successful” Waterfall projects mentioned in the HBR article was neither successful, nor a Waterfall project. I got invaluable help from Alistair Cockburn. He fact che
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Waterfall - The Dark Age of Software Development Has Returned!

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  I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ain’t so. — Everybody’s Friend, 1874, by Josh Billings To my horror, more and more often the past few years, I have seen people advocating for using the Waterfall method of software development. I have also seen it in job descriptions, for example “we use a mix of Agile and Waterfall”. Why am I horrified? Because Waterfall was never intended to become a software development method. Waterfall is now, as it was from the beginning, a way to describe why many large software development projects fail. There is no scenario where Waterfall is a good approach to software development ! To back up that statement, let’s go back to the origin of Waterfall, a whitepaper by Dr. Winston Royce, Managing the Development of Large Software Systems from 1970. The Origin of Waterfall Note : The origin of Waterfall goes back quite a bit further than 1970. In another, later article, Waterfall vs. Agile: Battle of the Dunces or a Rac
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Interlude: The Cost of Agile

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  Agile software development requires significant long term investments in developer skill. Most “Agilists” choose not to talk about it. I had just begun working on part four in my three part blog post series Are You Still Using the Wrong Control Levers in your Agile projects? , when I found myself writing a section about agile project economics. The section was rather long, and didn’t quite fit with the rest of part four, so I decided to break it out, and make it a separate blog post instead. This is it! I do hope you enjoy reading it. In case you wonder why there are four parts (five if you count this interlude) in a three part blog post series, well, requirements changed, and the scope increased… Agile methods have great benefits, both in human, and economic terms. There are also costs. Thus, going agile, if it is done seriously, requires thinking a bit about the trade-offs that must be made. Most companies don’t consider the trade-offs. What they do is they set up an “Agile tr
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