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Comment by chgs | Hacker News Reader

I do wonder how much of the backlash against agile is driven by people who never experienced waterfall

Either one of fine as long as you are doing it and not having it done to you. In the latter case, waterfall will crush your soul under a stack of binders, while agile is death by a thousand cuts.

That’s a really excellent insight! I’m going to use that!

Another common pitfall seems to be engineering teams choosing agile when the business engagement model is waterfall. This puts you in the unfortunate situation of trying to change requirements without being able to get paid for those changes.

The key issue appears to be how long it took to realize that existing infrastructure would present a showstopping cost. In practice, waterfall and agile are virtually indistinguishable in their ability to anticipate such issues early - they can, but doing so depends on factors independent of the differences in methodology.

Or who only experienced waterfall, which was always branded as agile.

I do wonder how much of the hate on “waterfall” is perpetuated by folks that never read the paper. It’s the “socialism” of development workflows…

Yeah, I was just being cheeky because I was trying to imagine software development models applied to large planned infrastructure.

A nuclear power station built successfully using an Agile process would be something I'd like to read about.

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