> You have to realise that before Agile, a fair portion of the software development projects that were started would simply bust and never get shipped. The code is a complete monster or the budget is nuked.
This still happens, all the time?
This still happens, all the time?
Imagine a system that couldn’t help you pick winning stocks, but It could cap the losers at 10% loss, maximum. You’d get rich. Very, very quickly.
Even traditional software projects are now much more incremental due to the ability to update once a week (FF, chrome, etc).
That's had an effect regardless of agile.
Projects still get cancelled, budgets and timelines get blown out, features and testing get compromised. But at least in dedicated software companies, it's pretty rare for something to get through 90% (or 150%) of its allotted development time and then be completely discarded as unsalvageable. (For technical reasons; market changes are a different beast.) Projects in technical crisis are either apparent sooner or have usable elements, rather than failing outright at the end of a waterfall.
Of course, there's a lot of room to debate what changed and why. If Agile led projects to fail sooner or less dramatically, that's still important, but less notable than if it changed them into successes. And a lot of technological advances have helped too; things that might have been outright failures as shrinkwrapped software can become late or overrun projects in the era of digital distribution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_...