
Agile Is the New Waterfall - janvdberg
https://medium.com/swlh/agile-is-the-new-waterfall-f7baef5d026d
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onion2k
_The cost of shipping the wrong thing is much higher than the cost of slipping
arbitrary deadlines to ship the right thing._

That assumes you can tell what the wrong thing is before you ship e.g. without
feedback. I don't believe you can. Agile is the process we use if we don't
know what that 'right thing' is. It's better to ship the wrong thing and then
fix it than to spend additional time on what you believe is the right thing
only to find that it was actually the wrong thing and have to fix it anyway.

If you know _absolutely_ what the problem is, what the best solution is, and
the situation isn't going to change during the course of the project, then
even waterfall will work. Agile is being willing to say "I don't know what the
solution is" when faced with something and not being stopped by that problem -
do what you can, put it in front of a user, gather feedback, and repeat.

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venomsnake
The main problem of the author is that he as a developer has not fought
development to be perceived as stakeholder. Which is the core of all problems.

If every tech related decision requires dev to have explicit buy in and
commit, and they are equal partners on the negotiating table - a lot of
problems then disappear.

I have recently been very blunt in some exchanges.

"\- How big should the project scale? \- Infinitely! \- In that case I will
need infinite time and budget"

I got reasonable estimates the next day.

As a developer it is your job to get the problem right, to evaluate the
business case for any feature request and give a better proposition if the
initial requests sucks.

And for the hated waterfall - well some big decisions are made at the
beginning of the project and are almost immutable - technology stack, module
boundaries, module interaction, available hardware.

It is once again your job to make sure that recruiting can deliver the right
people, that we can procure the needed hardware and so on.

~~~
devonkim
I've worked with the author before. A lot of projects handed to us are toxic
from the beginning and while start-ups fail often, the definite default for
projects from our customerbase was decidedly dead-by-default even with bright,
effective developers that articulate their points to stakeholders well like
you're saying is a responsibility.

There's a lot of hate in the replies but I think the context of that
experience would make his inflammatory arguments perfectly rational.

~~~
ljw1001
You will always get a lot of hate if you criticize someone's religion.

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codycowan
Yes, agile is basically waterfall when the people "practicing" it are using it
in name only. No one promised Agile would be Engineer Driven Development - it
should be team driven development. Anyone (business, product, marketing,
engineer, or otherwise) should be advocating for them to lead the process,
because thats how Waterfall starts, with one person in charge of decision
making.

Agile works when the user is the decision maker, and everyone on the team is
advocating for the user (although if its only product that is advocating for
the user, that works too). Its a group effort, not something that should just
magically work because "we're using agile now".

