TomSoft

Waterfall Drives IT Engineer Over the Edge

July 25th, 2006

Another discovery of the blogosphere: Innovation Creators (and at the same time I saw that there was an “Ajax Badge”)…Take a look at this post: Waterfall Drives IT Engineer Over the Edge (full of comics, so a good reading for everybody!).

I saw this happens too frequently (even in a startup!)! As you may know, I am CTO too, and I take the last quote of the blog:

“I do not blame the poor developer who was forced to stick rigidly to “the reqs doc”, but I do blame his CTO.”

As a big promoter of Agile methods, I must agree, but rais some point on why reality is not as easy as it’s described especially when the team started, 6 years ago. Things have changed a little bit since, thanks to the Web1/0 and 2.0 revolutions…But Waterfall has been teach in school, and in “serious” industry as THE method to do software development. Write requirement, than write functional specifications, than write technical specifications, then develop, test, etc… A document nightmare….I am so happy to see the “DRY” (Don’t Repeat YourSelf) concept emerging for software industry

The other issue that makes Agile development not so easy is customer involvement:

• The customer haves a job to do, so they expect finished tool, and usually don’t like to spend time with unfinished product. They expect the development team to understand their needs, and produce something “good”
• Development team expects some input from the customer. If his customer does not spend enough time with him, the natural fallback is to tie to the only input he haves, requirement….

There are not excuses not to import agile method, but more things to be aware of…But once things start, things are truly going much faster… It’s nice to see that current generation will be “agile aware”, and will be proud to reuse instead of recreate, to get gratification from his product usage instead of the technical cathedral that hass (not ) been build…

Technorati Tags: agile, software

Entry Filed under: Ajax