Reply to post: Re: IT, fostering delusions since 1977

Ministry of Justice abandons key plank of £280m IT project

bigbob

Re: IT, fostering delusions since 1977

No, waterfall is all but dead these days in software. Remember the software crisis? Massive failures like NHS National Programme for IT and BBC Digital Media Initiative. Hundreds of millions of pounds invested in IT projects without a single line of code making it to production - that's the hallmark of waterfall. Waterfall is a key element to how Sun Microsystems, IBM, Yahoo etc all worked, and they were simply outpaced by the FANG crowd doing agile. Read last year's 'Accelerate' book for plenty of research showing the agile/devops juggernaut delivering way way more than teams using waterfall.

Houses, bridges etc are mostly commodities. Built endlessly all over the world to the same well-worn architectures, same materials, same methods over many decades. Also very expensive to change anything once built. That's why waterfall and detailed specs up-front are best for building these sorts of things.

However, software is a very different beast. You're likely building something highly unique, and new for users, so you're simply going to get it wrong if you try to plan it in any detail. Tech changes quickly, so your raw materials and techniques are changing under your feet. However changing what you've built is cheap, enabling you to do prototyping and put stuff in front of users early on, to significantly de-risk big decisions. Being flexible like this often makes a huge difference to the success. Deliver an MVP to production within weeks and you'll find out very quickly if it is adding value and where to focus effort. YAGNI (You Aren't Going to Need It) is a big thing for cutting cost. You mention complexity, and in agile you should of course consider architecturally significant issues up front and review them as stuff comes up.

Sorry to the remaining waterfall brigade, but even by planning incredibly intelligently and thinking really hard at the start you're still onto a loser on average. Sorry that agile has been hyped up by arrogant kids in t-shirts and trainers, but all the evidence shows they are right.

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