I was browsing reddit.com the other day and ran into this post:
Image may be NSFW.
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Yup. It’s true. The tried and true development approach of Waterfall that we’ve been using for years was an example of what NOT to do for software development.
From the Wikipedia article: The first formal description of the waterfall model is often cited as a 1970 article by Winston W. Royce,[3] though Royce did not use the term “waterfall” in this article. Royce presented this model as an example of a flawed, non-working model (Royce 1970). This, in fact, is how the term is generally used in writing about software development—to describe a critical view of a commonly used software practice.
That’s what’s amazing about waterfall, and the agile transformations that seem to be taking the industry by storm. Maybe we all know deep down there is a better way to develop software.
I hope someday we don’t look back on Agile the same way we look back on Waterfall. I don’t think it will happen for the simple reason that Agile doesn’t have one methodology tied to it. Agile can mean a simple set of practices to help with software development, but it’s more like a mission statement as opposed to a plan.
