This is a fascinating article about the history of software development. For me the key quotes are:
The thing that killed Waterfall was that discovering your spec was wrong months later, after lots of code had been written - and fixing it cost a fortune because writing code was the most expensive part of the process.
The key reason Agile was invented was to account for the high cost of writing code, so yes, that part of the Agile value proposition is no more.
The risk isn’t that AI development is inherently Waterfall. The risk is that organizations with latent Waterfall instincts will use spec-generation as license to do the bad thing they always wanted to do — front-load requirements, skip customer validation, equate a fancier document with a better outcome, and ship one massive thing every quarter.
“The steering committee spent months on this spec, how many days will it take you to build it?” is an attitude I get far too often. These people always seem to think that conceiving of a piece of software is the hardest part of the process and they come close to breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for doing their part.
A well thought out software architecture is indeed worth a lot. So a group of engineers that are able to actually make accurate architecture and decisions from the get go would help a lot. But the problem is requirement changes. And that’s the core issue.
For something relatively set in stone like a car control system for ICE timing and whatnot, the requirement will not change by the fact that it is tied to another design which must also have been fixed beforehand and cannot be changed easily mid way willy nilly like software.
The engineer designing the engine must do a lot of administrative tasks again to make sure they pass every regulation under the sun when a change is made. We, the software guy does not have the equivalent of those barrier when a service requirement change. At most it is something about data privacy and security but that’s about it. Everything else is fair game
The thing that killed Waterfall was that discovering your spec was wrong months later, after lots of code had been written - and fixing it cost a fortune because writing code was the most expensive part of the process.
The thing is, you can’t just constantly adapt a software to changing requirements. If the foundation was made for a different terrain and building, whatever you build on it will not stand stable either.
So with agile, you get more stress for your developers for free and the result barely works. If the company really did agile and not tbe usual mess.
This is a fascinating article about the history of software development. For me the key quotes are:
“The steering committee spent months on this spec, how many days will it take you to build it?” is an attitude I get far too often. These people always seem to think that conceiving of a piece of software is the hardest part of the process and they come close to breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for doing their part.
A well thought out software architecture is indeed worth a lot. So a group of engineers that are able to actually make accurate architecture and decisions from the get go would help a lot. But the problem is requirement changes. And that’s the core issue.
For something relatively set in stone like a car control system for ICE timing and whatnot, the requirement will not change by the fact that it is tied to another design which must also have been fixed beforehand and cannot be changed easily mid way willy nilly like software.
The engineer designing the engine must do a lot of administrative tasks again to make sure they pass every regulation under the sun when a change is made. We, the software guy does not have the equivalent of those barrier when a service requirement change. At most it is something about data privacy and security but that’s about it. Everything else is fair game
A spec that’s more than a single page rarely survives initial contact with reality.
The thing is, you can’t just constantly adapt a software to changing requirements. If the foundation was made for a different terrain and building, whatever you build on it will not stand stable either.
So with agile, you get more stress for your developers for free and the result barely works. If the company really did agile and not tbe usual mess.
Agile came from toyota? It wasnt invented by software companies
My understanding is that Kanban came from Toyota, which is an agile way of working.