Re:Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in
by regularfry on Monday December 06, 2021 @02:01PM
(#29464091)
It's more subtle than that. What "agile" does (both Scrum and XP, historically) is _protect the delivery team_. With waterfall-style project management, early errors balloon but often don't surface as something that needs addressing until implementation and testing, so the delivery team gets all the stress for blowing out the project schedule.
Agile techniques both surface those errors early, so they're course-corrected quickly, and provide a set of clear rules for the rest of the organisation to abide by which should mean that the delivery team can't get overloaded into a deathmarch.
If you stray outside that, both waterfall and agile struggle… but waterfall has the potential fatal flaw of delivering a product no one wants (or doesn’t work).
This is why agile was introduced. There were software products being made that ended up just not working… so people saw that problem and tried to fix it with agile. But agile just fixes the “don’t deliver a product that doesn’t work” problem.