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Comment by andyroid | Hacker News Reader

The difference is that of ivory tower planning and the following phases of development, testing and a “big bang” release (waterfall) vs working with an MVP with the purpose of releasing as soon as possible and then work in iterations based off of actual feedback and demand (agile). If you manage to nuke your budget or create a monster of a code base already at the MVP stage no methodology is going to save you.

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I really do believe agile (or at least "not waterfall") has reduced the rate of major software flops. But I'd be fascinated to know how often it turns failures into successes, versus revealing failures earlier in the project cycle. Both are valuable, obviously. It's just interesting that part of Agile's value is in revealing engineer dysfunction or fundamentally bad ideas at the MVP stage instead of the completion stage.

Revealing failure early is at least as valuable as succeeding more!

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.

I'd be more inclined to give the credit for less software flops to the rise of the internet and the ability to update easily.

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.

That’s a point, and I agile development would not be possible without the internet. But working incrementally based off of customer/user input is only possible after the first release. What was observed here was the huge number of projects that would previously fail without ever getting that point.

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