
Agile or Waterfall; a risk management perspective - mottalrd
http://www.alfredo.motta.name/agile-or-waterfall-a-risk-management-perspective/
======
mottalrd
The author here, thank you for checking this link, looking forward to your
thoughts in the comments! Summary below.

\---------

Today Agile is the default choice for the software development life cycle
(SDLC); every conference, book, or blog post is telling us we are doomed to
fail if we don’t follow this established convention. But isn’t it surprising
to think that we should use Agile for every possible company doing software
out there? Are we going to organize software development exactly the same way
if we work for a startup, NASA, or FedEx? It seems hard to believe.

If you are already screaming this is heresy! …please bear with me; I am not
trying to send us back to the dark ages of Waterfall. At the same time, no
project or company is the same and we should keep thinking about Why we do
what we do. Choosing the appropriate SDLC requires a deep understanding of the
dynamics of your environment.

In this blog post, I will use the lenses of risk management to help you pick
what SDLC is right for you. We will first look at how to put your software
development lifecycle into context by interpreting it as a risk map. We will
then look briefly at the history of Agile and Waterfall and why these risk
maps make sense in their own context. Finally, we are going to learn how to
use Cynefin and Wardley maps as tools to better understand the uniqueness of
your risk territory, so you can pick the software lifecycle that better suits
your team or company profile.

I hope you enjoy the journey and looking forward to your thoughts in the
comments.

~~~
eesmith
Why is the topic almost always dichotomized into "waterfall" and "agile"?

Does "agile" these days simply mean "not pure waterfall"? If not, what are
other life cycles?

I often bring this up because my introduction to the topic was in the 1990s
through Steve McConnell's 1996 book "Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software
Schedules". It lists a number of software development life cycles in chapter
7, "Lifecycle Planning". From the ToC these are:

Pure Waterfall • Code-and-Fix • Spiral • Modified Waterfalls • Evolutionary
Prototyping • Staged Delivery • Design-to-Schedule • Evolutionary Delivery •
Design-to-Tools • Commercial Off-the-Shelf Software

Yet those different approaches, and their respective advantages and
disadvantages, are rarely mentioned.

~~~
mottalrd
I didn't know about that chapter, will definitely check it out now!

