We've invented waterfall

by latch • 15 years ago

285 168 15 years ago

mrspandex• 15 years ago

Is this a joke?

karmajunkie2• 15 years ago

I honestly thought it was, but crawling the rest of the site it doesn't have an ounce of parody about it. I think these guys really think this is a new methodology...

karmajunkie2• 15 years ago

For example, link to their "Chief Software Architect" linkedin profile: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=1613224

bruinseve• 15 years ago

Sadly, I don't think this is a joke. Method as described: "Analysis We don't write a line of code until we know your business as well as the people who keep it running every day. " Method as implemented: "Analysis We never write any code"

davidu• 15 years ago

This doesn't look like a joke. Dangerous. Anyone who has done this methodology runs screaming for an exit after a failed project or two.

tintin• 15 years ago

Not so fast. This isn't something new or strange at all. We are doing this for years with great success.

But maybe you know this method as these steps (which are the same): Concept -> Functional design -> Graphic design -> Building -> Testing -> Deploy.

Nothing strange about that. Take a look at the IBM Rational Unified Process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Rational_Unified_Process

I just think this is a hyped site trying to sell there book.

outworlder• 15 years ago

Or better yet: don't ever look at anything from Rational (now IBM).

Unless you are a consulting company the size of IBM. With the same business model.

aidenn02• 15 years ago

It's not new or strange at all, but I would hesitate to call it a success.

brd• 15 years ago

Its really not quite as bad as it looks at first glance.

Step 2: "we design an interactive prototype" allows them to get the feedback that really makes more agile methods work. You don't need to constantly iterate during development if you iterate properly during prototyping. I certainly wouldn't advocate this method but its not a vanilla waterfall method.

AndrewDucker• 15 years ago

Agreed - this isn't as poisonous as the usual waterfall techniques are.

And frankly, if you're working on a massive project that has strict requirements (either regulatory or functional) then up-front analysis has a lot going for it.

edu• 15 years ago

The original waterfall spec. describes the usage of prototypes. I wrote a small review of it a few weeks ago: http://emtrics.com/2011/10/17/software-development-a-little-...

ctdonath2• 15 years ago

That they insert what amounts to a single early design iteration hardly rescues the inanity of "hey! I sliced bread! this is awesome!"

absconditus• 15 years ago

If one reads the paper most commonly cited as the source of the waterfall methodology he or she will discover that the author of the paper recommends doing something akin to prototyping before designing the real program. The paper is actually a critique of the process now commonly referred to as waterfall and the author does not recommend using the process as first presented in the critique.

arctangent2• 15 years ago

Royce's paper can be found here:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Process/wate...

tpatke• 15 years ago

Meh. This is hardly the most ridiculous thing I have seen on the internet. I am sure this methodology will work sometimes for some clients. Heck, I bet a lot of startups here on HackerNews are using similar methodologies - but without the early usability testing. If nothing else, at least this company are differentiating themselves. Haven't seen a lot of other consultancies get posted up here on HackerNews.

Every project is different. We should try and not be too dogmatic about these things.

goldmab2• 15 years ago

This was posted on HN so that we can make fun of it, and I think we're right to do so. You can be as wishy washy as you like about different situations requiring different processes, but have you ever seen somebody successfully isolate software engineering from coding and put them in sequence?

pingswept• 15 years ago

Most of us would probably agree that their method is worse than more modern methods, but spending time making fun of them is like making fun of someone for driving an old car. You could be working on your startup right now.

MortenK5• 15 years ago

Waterfall is actually considered the very best model for software development, when the requirements are known up front in excruciating detail.

An average project experience around 25% change in requirements. Hence waterfall is highly unsuited for the majority of projects, since it does not handle requirement changes well.

However, in a few areas such as aeroplane control software, space shuttle software and similar, waterfall is indeed the optimal development process.

Different projects DO require different development processes. That's not wishy washy, it's the reality of software engineering.

Mindlessly applying your favourite development process to all projects, be it waterfall, scrum, evolutionary prototyping, spiral development or what have you, will very likely result in failure, if the process does not fit the project.

wwweston• 15 years ago

I actually once worked for a place that didn't have this exact process, but they had a heavy process I'm sure nobody would describe as agile. And it worked pretty darn well.

They designed educational games for early elementary education. Every game activity was hashed out with a working committee consisting of an educator, a technical writer, an artist, and a programmer. They'd take a few hours and talk about the concept that the kid playing the game was supposed to learn (say, measures of weight), then they'd brainstorm ideas for potentially entertaining scenarios in which the concept could be explored (say, a flea circus), then they'd start to storyboard various activities and interactions.

Then the tech writer would produce notes, people would review them, and 2-3 weeks later, they'd do it again, refining concepts and interactions.

This process would stretch out over months, and by the time it was finished, the tech writer's notes essentially comprised a complete state machine for the activity described in English on paper. And the artists/media people had the assets for you in the right media formats. Usually sensibly named. Programming was generally pretty straightforward.

You know how a lot of the time that non-technical "idea guys" seem to have this terrible attitude? "Hey, I've already done the hard work of coming up with the idea, all you need to do is translate it into code."

This was one of those rare situations where it was often more or less true. But it was because the people coming up with the concepts were really part of a creative and disciplined process where they had to come to grips with the details in a way that usually only programmers have to.

Oh, and after things were done with programming, they had a QA team compare it against the spec and an educator's review.

They produced a pretty good product. Sometimes I think it's a shame I didn't stay longer.

Zarathust• 15 years ago

I agree with you. After a few years in the field, I'm now convinced that it is how most software is made. Even in the "Agile" startups and such, processes are often implemented as waterfall, or large parts of projects comply with the waterfall model.

While it fails sometimes, there are plenty of success stories about the waterfall model, like it or not.

haasted• 15 years ago

The ridiculous aspect of this page is the quote "We've invented a development process tbat's completely unique in the industry.", after which they describe a process that looks entirely like waterfall. It's an entertaining fallacy.

tomlin• 15 years ago

The company I work for has had a very similar process for years. In fact, it's stated much better within the first line of text on the homepage.

I think a workflow approach is a better way to go for the client, but even our approach was inspired by other companies who have embraced a transparent workflow methodology such as this.

It's painful to see a company claim it as a first.

stfu• 15 years ago

The sad part is, that most of their clients are probably buying into this and think what an excellent and innovative company they hired.

ctdonath2• 15 years ago

Few seem to realize that source code is but the most thorough "blueprint" of the product. That compilation - to wit construction of the actual product from the blueprint - is nigh unto instant and free means everyone overlooks it as the actual construction process, akin to actually building a bridge from detailed plans (except you get one shot at building a bridge, while you can recompile every few minutes). Ergo, "analysis", at greatest detail, _is_ coding. That we iterate so much comes from the continued newness of the technology and the relative complexity of the products; bridges are well-understood and iterating the design of one is minimal.

To the site's point (or missing thereof), the notion of "don't start coding until the analysis is complete" is a gross misunderstanding that coding IS analysis.

The inanity of reinventing the waterfall model is obvious to HN readers.

goldmab2• 15 years ago

It sounds like you're saying something similar to this: http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.h...

manuscreationis• 15 years ago

Doesn't look as terrible as "true" waterfall, but I think this is just marketing fluff to win people over by telling them about your rock-solid practices.

If they have an arrow that looped from Beta Testing back into Interface Design/Usability/Engineering/Coding, you'd probably end up with what most shops do anyways, speaking in broad strokes.

cridal• 15 years ago

"We've invented cigarettes", come buy a pack... everything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger...

bernardes• 15 years ago

"Unlike a traditional development process, ours establishes all the system's requirements before a line of code is written."

This is freakin' unbelievable. ROFL

blueprint• 15 years ago

Might explain why the "Code" part of their process seems so lacking in substantial details!

fijal• 15 years ago

Did you notice how men in suits are left and right but not in the middle?

tryke• 15 years ago

I wondered who the man with the clipboard was, micro-managing every step of the process.

wingo• 15 years ago

My favorite was the mud-robot dominated by a timepiece.

reledi2• 15 years ago

My favourite part was how the people appear to hate their jobs. Only in the last panel (Deployment) do you see anyone from the team smiling.

Ronnie76er• 15 years ago

Waterfall isn't bad in all circumstances. Lockheed Martin isn't iterating a jet into the side of a mountain 100 times until they get it right.

dylancm• 15 years ago

have you _seen_ the US's defense budget?

TeMPOraL2• 15 years ago

tl; dr: I think Waterfall vs. Agile religious war is wrong; it's mostly about that you can't hit a moving target without a feedback loop.

That's why I don't think the discussion should really be Waterfall vs. Agile, it should be about feedback loops in the process. There are circumstances in e.g. military or medical projects where you absolutely, positively, need to work to an approved spec with time & budget analysis, etc.; it seems to be common outside of software (I don't see much of agile-built bridges or jetplanes). There are those parts of the process that can be predicted (and have their cost estimated) relatively well - those you plan in advance (aka. waterfall). There are others, where you only have a somewhat vague and changing final goal - there your only real solution is a process with a tight feedback loop (aka. agile).

Now you can look at software process on different levels - what might look like waterfall from the high level may be in fact a collection of very agile sub-processes. Which may contain waterfally sub-levels (like, isn't a single iteration of TDD red-green-refactor cycle a bit waterfally? ;). So I think instead of thinking about "agile vs. waterfall" we should consider what feedback loops we need where, and how tight they should be.

aidenn02• 15 years ago

The definition of waterfall is that there is no loop. When one step is done, it's done.

arctangent2• 15 years ago

Perhaps not.

But they're probably running a computer model of the jet (and its systems) under various simulated scenarios.

They're also probably building some full-scale mock-ups to test in wind tunnels.

And they also have test pilots to fly things which sometimes never make it into wide scale production.

So, I'd argue that there is some iteration going on there.

martininmelb• 15 years ago

Which is also what the company is claiming to do. I.e. we will create a prototype and walk you through it before we start coding.

pnathan• 15 years ago

My understanding of early jet planes and test pilots suggests that they were iterating jets through ejections and near-crash experiences. :-)

In the 1950s, test pilots were being killed at the rate of about one a week[1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_pilot

johnx123-up2• 15 years ago

Agreed. Waterfall is usually better when you do client projects. Agile would be better when you do your own product, at the same time Agile may lead to cost overrun.

shareme• 15 years ago

Would this help design a process to Balance the US gov budget?

tpimental• 15 years ago

Maybe they aren't aware of Waterfall. Pete Campbell on Mad Men had a great quote; "You know what? I have good ideas. In fact, I used to carry around a notebook and a pen, just to keep track. Direct marketing? I thought of that. It turned out it already existed, but I arrived at it independently."

joshsusser• 15 years ago

If they are such experts, how would they not be aware of waterfall? Either they are idiots who have no clue about software development methodology, or they are just lying (either to their customers or themselves). It's not like it's hard to find a reference to waterfall if you bother to look.

shotgun• 15 years ago

I sent their Chief Architect a linkedin message to make him aware of this thread. Hopefully we'll hear from him.

bmccormack• 15 years ago

The site looks nice. Whether or not their methods are the best, I've worked for quite a few folks who would find their presentation very appealing. Because they've been burned by companies who wrote code for them that didn't meet their expectations, they're excited about a company that will actually listen to their expectations thoroughly before the process begins.

jrockway• 15 years ago

How do you do usability testing without the real software having been written?

I never realized just how insane waterfall is until I saw this diagram. Wow.

fypomg• 15 years ago

We've invented the mobile un-friendly site! We are industry pioneers!

How are we missing the -

Paperback + Consultation for $250 Complete 45 page book (45 pages?) Ships within 2 days 1 hour 1-on-1 consultation Expert implementation advice

They sound like experts to me. 37signals book Rework only has 288 pages $11. Page count doesn't mean everything, but clearly 37sig is stuffed with fluff. All you need is 45 to change to the game up.

I'm a non-profit and small business owner, I'm sold!

giberson• 15 years ago

Here's what I would like to see from a consulting company for once. Don't interview the stake holders of the company, they don't use the software like their employees do. They have a high level overview based on feedback from their employees. When you interview them, you're getting second hand information that will likely be missing key points that they forgot to mention or just simply think is obvious and doesn't require mentioning.

So here's what you should do. Over the shoulder review of a representative employee of each department. HR, AP, AR etc. Actively watch and understand the processes they go through. FOR AN ENTIRE 8 HOUR SHIFT.

No, seriously.

Now, you've got a good idea of how its done current.

Then do the stake holder interview to find out what they want to do differently.

Then plan, develop and deploy your software.

I seriously don't get why despite there being a recognized need for understanding the problem scope which everyone one will invest hours in meetings and conference calls talking about, no one actually invests any (significant) time doing, or reviewing the actual process. It's the fastest most efficient way to understand the problem. It would totally diminish months of back and forth "here's what you asked for" "no, that's not what I asked for" development review process that almost _always_ occurs with consultant projects.

/rant

TheCapn• 15 years ago

Say what you will about large corporations but at the very least they can get this right. I'm working for a 4,000+ company now and we take these steps very seriously during our Engineering design. Also part of the job is working with vendors (Oracle, HP, others) who send people on sight from around the world to work with us (the client) and properly interview for the right knowledge.

Call me bias, but a lot of smaller companies overlook tried and tested standards. Proper requirement elicitation was documented in IEEE Computer Society SWEBOK prior to 2004 and even that is a summary of important knowledge to Software Engineering profession. Why is it that when a new company comes along with a truly innovative concept they feel they can innovate the rest of the process as well?

roc3• 15 years ago

Let me tell you why you don't see this happening more often.

I did this on a project a few years back. I replaced a paper workflow process that was taking up two people each in three departments with a web-based workflow that increased visibility, dropped turn-around time from days to minutes, increased accountability and accuracy and trimmed those 16 person hours of processing down to 1-2 per department.

Everyone who directly interacted with the new system loved it. Numerous edge cases that would have been lost in high-level review were caught and integrated from day 1 due to my actually watching people do the job for a day or two per department. The solution has been rock solid (minor maintenance only) for five years.

And I almost lost the job.

The people who sign the checks were furious. The balance of political power between departments were thrown for a loop. One head in particular treated the thing as a near-existential threat. His entire concept of his job revolved around being the authoritative interface for retrieving and maintaining pieces of data that were no longer exclusively under his control. Another flipped out because middle management saw the results as cause to reduce his headcount and budget, and thus importance.

These two departments fought for months, refusing to contribute their shares of budget that were pledged toward modernizing this system.

On a technical and practical level, it was the single best experience I've ever had as a consultant. On a personal and economic level, is was one of the worst. It was some of the hardest money I've ever tried to collect. It was some of the most time and energy I've put into the political and 'sales' side of a job (the part I treat as a necessary evil, but very much evil). The corporation has made out like a bandit in the long run. But I paid the price.

It's simply too easy and financially rewarding to allow a client's political nonsense to screw up every stage of a project. I have less stress, the people who pay me are happier and I bill far more hours.

As with most software, internally developed software included, you don't see better projects more often because the incentives are horribly perverted and stacked against it.

blader• 15 years ago

Wow. Thanks for sharing that. This paints a really clear picture of why so much enterprise software are pieces of crap.

twerth• 15 years ago

Well said, and the exact reason I moved away from consulting after a decade of doing it.

The developers often get blamed for "not understanding how real people use the system". Most features are requested by C level people who have never actually used the system.

While consulting, I've actually been told NOT to talk to the users who will be using the system. In a large enterprise it is often about power and politics, it is rarely about building value and increasing productivity.

Vote with your labor, work for a small company.

metaskills• 15 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGS2tKQhdhY

namank4• 15 years ago

There is process called Contextual Design. Part of it talks about treating the tacit knowledge of a workplace like a very necessary requirement for your software. So that means including the culture of the workplace in your reqs.

It sounds dumb at first but it makes perfect sense. What you did at that place was to apply a bandaid to a fracture where it really should have been a cast. But you didn't know it was a fracture because you didn't look past the swelling to the root cause of the pain. This is nothing new, consultants have been loathed for this very reason for a long time now.

That was me telling you how to do your job. If you wanna know more, google it. If ya got offended, have a nice day!

sleight426• 15 years ago

Having consulted with various branches of the US Govt for about 13 years, I can safely say that this is almost exactly how most govt projects work. They are far more often about satisfying political objectives for bureaucrats than helping the user.

This is why I'm far happier now consulting to startups than to large corporations or the govt.

Craiggybear• 15 years ago

Oh God. I sympathise I really do. I have been in that particular situation twice and never again. I am very wary about internal politics in certain types of organisation and like to have a full overview of it way before commiting myself. If that's not possible I don't take the work.

I admit to liking waterfall myself (it suits the kind of work I do) and if well done by competent people and for certain types of project its the way to go ...

cleaver• 15 years ago

From my experience in consulting (over a decade), I have to agree. It's extremely difficult to convince people to do things right. It's sooo much easier to give a friendly grin, a firm handshake, maybe dinner or a round of golf and state emphatically that "you need an ERP or CRM or other three-letter acronym".

Ultimately, it comes to corporate Darwinism... the companies that evolve reasonable processes prevail. Others will only leave a fossil record. Unfortunately, we have governments as well as corporations.

nlawalker• 15 years ago

>> It's simply too easy and financially rewarding to allow a client's political nonsense to screw up every stage of a project. I have less stress, the people who pay me are happier and I bill far more hours.

This is now one of my favorite comments from this site. Very well put!

theorique• 15 years ago

Great anecdote that illustrates this principle observed by Upton Sinclair:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." (from I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked)

Duff2• 15 years ago

My favorite thing like this for a purely technical topic was a project where there was a mandatory requirement to NOT support ethernet auto-negotiation.

Why? The company had a long-standing policy of manually setting speed and duplex to ensure that there were no duplex mismatches. The was a team of 6-7 people who would audit servers and check switchports, and they produced a report was issued every week, and reviewed by the CIO and other luminaries. People would be shamed for errant configurations, as only the auto-negotiation team could configure NICs.

The director who controlled the auto-negotiate squad was politically powerful, and got all sorts of power out of it -- including banning GigE. As late as 2010, this org was deploying dozens of 100MB NICs to ESX hosts to get sufficient bandwidth. They also purchased 100MB NICs for desktops.

recusancy• 15 years ago

This needs to be a post in itself!

PakG1• 15 years ago

For these political reasons, it's important to have executive-level support, or else it would never fly. My first job out of school was doing exactly as the gp suggests at a national telecom. Job-shadowing people in their day-to-day work, understanding their problems, and turning around web/desktop apps within days or weeks to solve their problems. We had huge success. We won an international award for what it's worth (Stevie Awards for Best Support Team). We saved our company millions, and were one of the keys for the company to survive a big labour dispute. Can you believe that previously, for a national telecom, all orders for corporate telecom solutions had to be gateway-checked by a single person? We democratized stuff like that so that processes could be much more flat. No need for requirements documents, no change control, complete freedom of creativity, complete freedom to decide what work to accept, etc. I know how that's sometimes necessary for big projects, but for small high-ROI stuff, it was beautiful.

The other side of the story is that we ran into huge political problems. Every day, someone was trying to kill our team because we were making the traditional IT groups look bad with our turnaround time and solutions that worked. On the other side, we were automating things that people didn't want automated. If we didn't have support from the CEO down through a specific chain of command, we would have been killed within months, if not weeks. We didn't even call ourselves developers. Our official position title was business analyst because then IT would bug us less. We weren't even part of the official IT department because those guys couldn't get outside the box. So we were just a small group of business analysts who tried to hide until we were too successful to hide anymore. That's when the attacks really started coming. And then we continued to be successful, and then they started trying to copy us instead. Last I heard, that team's unfortunately been swallowed up by the bureaucracy now, and is a shadow of what it once was.

Fascinating experience.

edit: added end of the story

grecy• 15 years ago

This is exactly how we did process review / analysis at my last company. It was always awesome to uncover the differences between what the stake holders thought the current process was, and what the people actually doing it did.

After that we tried to reconcile the differences and usually made the in-software process a mixture of the two (where possible)

incongruity• 15 years ago

You're exactly right – but you realize, there's a whole group of people -- a whole discipline, in fact, that does exactly what you're talking about, right?

We're designers.

And we do have & run consultancies. Places like IDEO, Frog Design, Adaptive Path, RED, Doblin (Part of the Monitor group now), Gravity Tank, Teague -- and many, many more.

User centered design processes should be backed up by rich user stories, that come from real user experiences. The only way to do that is to go out in the field and get exposure to the who, what, when, why and how of what the users are doing, want to do/need to do and how they use your product/service.

And if you do it right, you can make a much more successful product that sells a lot better while actually doing some good for the users.

Not a bad line of work, IMHO.

gaius• 15 years ago

This is why corporate software like SAP is so bad. The guy who writes the cheques to the vendor doesn't do timesheets or whatever. His secretary does his expenses and his travel and his holidays. He never touches the software apart from to look at the dashboard and the final generated reports (which will be whizzy). He literally doesn't know it's miserable to use, and unless "subordinates satisfaction with corporate apps" is his bonus metric, literally couldn't give a flying fuck even if he did know.

SatvikBeri• 15 years ago

Part of why I love my current job is because we focus on the actual users of the software and get feedback from them, not the executives.

It made the initial sales much harder, but the results are much stronger and we've gained such a strong reputation that the software almost sells itself.

ap22213• 15 years ago

Hilarious.

But all jokes aside, have you ever tried to explain to a self-described 'technical-enough-to-be-dangerous' corporate middle manager what an iterative and incremental process is?

willurd2• 15 years ago

I actually know Clark Valberg, the founder of Epicenter Consulting, and did some work with him a few years back; he's a great guy. You guys can criticize him all you want, but he actually cares.

We should direct our efforts towards the bloodsuckers, not the people giving blood.

rickmb• 15 years ago

We you say "he cares" I presume you mean "cares about slick marketing to clueless clients". Because Epicenter obviously doesn't give a damn about either the truth or software engineering.

I'm sorry, but the people who claim the one true method is keeping the programmers locked in the basement without real world input or feedback are the bloodsuckers.

willurd2• 15 years ago

No, I mean that he cares about giving his clients a great product. He's not just in it to soak money out of people; he actually cares about the outcome, much like an artist cares about their paintings.

And look, I'm not Clark. I don't speak for Clark. This is just the experience I had working with him and getting to know him for a year and a half.

zedshaw3• 15 years ago

Actually, this is refreshingly honest compared to the "agile" methodologies. Having worked with plenty of supposedly agile consultants I can tell you they basically do waterfall it's just their cascading stupidity starts with code and then wanders around writing unit tests until the client is tapped out. At least this is doing some actual user interface design and usability testing.

Then again, I doubt these guys do this since it's all marketing.

jameskilton2• 15 years ago

Really? Claiming to have invented the most well know and also the worst software development process is honest? It's a bold-faced lie written only to get clients.

One can only imagine what actually happens in communication once they have a client. If the marketing is a complete lie, then I can't imagine the company itself can be trusted.

zedshaw3• 15 years ago

>Claiming to have invented the most well know and also the worst software development process is honest?

They claim to have developed the best process, just like all the agile con artists out there.

bh42222• 15 years ago

The difference between "agile" and "waterfall" isn't that easy to pin down.

Some people think of "agile" as just going through their full waterfall process every month or every two weeks.

Other people insist the core of "agile" is TDD, others claim nonsense, TDD is just as much part of "waterfall", and yet others don't see any point in TDD for their "agile" process.

tl;dr:

It's all bullshit, all the way down.

sleight426• 15 years ago

Most "agile" consultants you know start coding from day one? If so, I now understand much better why you dump so much on agile.

I had myself a nice little nerd slap fight on twitter earlier today about this post. "Agile" without up front planning and research is just dangerous.

zedshaw3• 15 years ago

Oh, now we're going to get into the perpetual argument of what is really agile? Agile's like porn. Everybody who does it claims they know what it is, but nobody can define it. Instead they call "successful" projects properly agile and failures are just shoved under the rug with claims they didn't do agile hard enough.

So please, save your criticism that you know what is and clearly I don't. You can't define it, and if you think you can I know you don't follow it.

MattRogish• 15 years ago

If you read the book's PDF (http://epicenterconsulting.com/book_source/Obsessively-Thoro...) you'll also note that:

"Hal was the first to introduce the concept of building an interactive demo as a key part of the software development process"

Really? I can't imagine that's true

winterwaterfall• 15 years ago

Check out Hal's website with JavaScript disabled:

http://www.halhelms.com/

What's going on there? Hal Helms home helplessly hacked? Or just poor page design?

dicroce• 15 years ago

Ok, I just invented a new methodology, I dub thee: "Agilefall"

First we meet and discuss the goals for the sprint. Then I design (usually some class diagrams on a sheet of paper or board), then I code and test it (unit tests of course) and finally check it in. Each 4 to 6 week sprint is internally structured as a waterfall. :)

bascule• 15 years ago

I thought the most bothersome thing on the entire page was the claim they put "business over code". Without working software you don't have a business.

j45• 15 years ago

Am I in the minority who uses both agile and waterfall methods?

The long and the short of it for me is this: There's two ways to solve problems. Agile helps immensely when you are figuring out how the solution would work. When you're solving a problem that might be solved in manual processes largely, Waterfall can help a lot, but not alone.

For unknown solutions, agile gives you a lot of iterative benefits.

For known solutions, waterfall with some agile feedback loops gives you incremental benefits.

What's the difference?

Sometimes, in a business, they have a great process already. It's in paper, or multiple systems, but they have their way of doing things that works. I believe it's called their competitive advantage.

Othertimes, a business is facing a problem for the first time, and wonder "how do we solve this". In this case, doing a big upfront design is a waste of time, starting small and staying flexible is most important.

For me, this mindset of doing both is critical, not one or the other at all times. You simply miss out on too much if you don't use agile, and you run around too much if you ignore waterfall when a solution exists.

Waterfall works where it's a known process, like building a house. You can have agile loops in there when building a house and improve it as you go.

When you're trying to build a new building that's never been built before, an iterative, feedback-centric approach like Agile is a lot more beneficial.

If a company focuses on taking something like Waterfall and introducing feedback loops (agile) like this epicenter thing, is it not a bit clearer than the black-box voodoo out there? Maybe it's just me, but I applaud anyone trying to make software easier. It just shouldn't be a dogmatic, or religious dismissal.

0.02.

feedus• 15 years ago

I've invented "rock".

I don't talk to anyone.

I look at the crap you're using and make something new.

I give you the URL.

Figure it out on your own.

Invoice due on receipt.

msluyter• 15 years ago

I love the fact that the software engineers basically deliver UML diagrams to the coders. I'd shoot myself if that were all there was to my job.

Amadeus2011• 15 years ago

Some of these comments are missing the point. Their methodology isn't about how to build but on what to build. It's a problem many industries face. When the client is a non-technical person (the norm in making web apps) building the UI first makes good sense.

johnx123-up2• 15 years ago

I agree. Most of the comments are overlooked. I suspect that the OP is competitor to the said company?

eweise• 15 years ago

I love how each coder has a giant clock right in front of their face.

alabut4• 15 years ago

I've got a bone to pick with people that have a bone to pick with waterfall, especially when they don't realize that whatever competing newer workflow they swear by is actually waterfall in disguise.

Let's just ignore for a second that a waterfall process sent men to the moon and continues to build skyscrapers, with each project having a set of stakeholders the size of a small city and all while adjusting to a shifting landscape of nearly infinite variables. Especially the first few moon missions, when no one had done it before. It's why all of the original astronauts were test pilots - not just because of their bravado but also their experience in co-designing unfinished machines along with the engineers to bring it to a workable finished state. The roots of the modern HCI and human factors industries comes from analyzing and optimizing the usability of cockpits. The astronauts even had their own usability jokes about a model of training jet that was so user-unfriendly that the emergency instructions for ejection were printed on the side of the canopy, which is nuts because step one was to blow the canopy (along with the rest of the instructions) up off into the sky.

These weren't dumb monkeys strapped to a giant tin can and blown into space, and neither were the engineers that sent them there. With waterfall.

So you use agile/xp/scrum/whatever and swear software is way different than building bridges. I've worked on and with several of those teams, with varying levels of strictness, and guess what? It's still basically waterfall. But instead of PMs owning the process and spec'ing things out in advance, engineers own the process and the spec is written and re-written during development on a bunch of index cards with sharpies like a grade school art project (or the digital equivalent), designers get barely a week ahead of each sprint or run around like caffeinated janitors cleaning up after each sprint, and documentation gets written last or not at all.

And before anyone does ad hominem attacks on whether my teams were doing agile correctly, this is the same dynamic I witnessed at the most famous agile and rails development shop you can think of. You probably only need one guess to figure out who it is.

What matters then, if it's not process? It's called expertise - a broad collection of various techniques and the context-specific awareness of when to use each one. Instead of blindly following a process and trying to hammer it into every situation, take a tools-instead-of-rules approach to using whatever techniques are appropriate for each project.

For anyone interested in this kind of flexible thinking instead of linear GTD productivity tools that leave you stuck in robot mode, there's an excellent book called Pragmatic Thinking And Learning that goes into a lot more detail and pulls inspiration from how the nursing industry overhauled their education system in the 70's.

http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learni...

I know, from the book publisher that sells the pickaxe Rails book and stuff on agile. Oh the irony!

potatohead00• 15 years ago

Interesting outlook on things... I've always thought (and argued when possible) that the key to any software/computer issue is smart people - not 'rockstars' and these developers who think they're the center of the universe, but a team of capable people, familiar with a broad range of technology and capable of solving problems, using whatever tools are needed. But I have long thought that waterfall just couldn't work - but I suppose it could if you have management and executives that understand the 'product' at the end will be iterated.

I have also been meaning to pick up that book...

Stormbringer2• 15 years ago

Back when the competing methodologies were waterfall and RAD they used to say that 50% of all software projects failed.

When Agile became super popular they started saying that 70% of all software projects failed.

Hmmm....

wpietri5• 15 years ago

I'm totally not getting why you're saying agile approaches are waterfall in disguise.

The essential difference to me is in length of feedback loops. Microsoft releases a new OS every few years; some place like Etsy releases new code many times a day. A developer or product manager at Etsy can know within a few hours whether some change is really a good idea; Microsoft not so much.

You seem to be saying that because there are the same sorts of people involved, and because one has a giant spec document while another has a stack of index cards that might be called a spec, then they're the same. Which isn't making any sense to me.

Stormbringer2• 15 years ago

Agilistas like to pretend that if you're doing waterfall you can't ever go back to the previous step.

Whereas in practice, if you find something wrong or confusing with the specification, you just hunt down the business analysts and ask them what drugs they were on when they pooped out the spec. And then after walking them through their mistake, you get a new and better spec.

If you do it often enough, they will start to catch on and actually do their job better. Don't think of that as a poke at BA's either, everybody puts more effort in if they know that someone gives a crap about what they do. They may not like it at first, but you're actually empowering them.

alabut4• 15 years ago

Nope, it has nothing to do with the commonalities in people or roles, sorry I wasn't clear. Let me try again.

It's a knock on all rigid processes and dogma, not agile in particular. I trimmed the rant down by taking out the sections that rip into UX firms, with their Big Upfront Design and cocky rockstar designer personas, but it could just as easily been about them. I only cut it because I thought the parallels were obvious with the diagram on the Epic Consulting website.

What I'm saying is that if waterfall means people are grouped together by specialty - programmers with programmers, designers with designers - each group is run by one dominant process suited to only one of the specializations, and each group tends to work in different stages, then both traditional UX design and agile development are run as de facto waterfall teams, whether by explicit hierarchies or simple stakeholder buy-in.

Consider this - what's the difference between:

1) a PM spec'ing things out in advance and basically telling everybody what to do and in which order.

2) an agile shop coding things up on the fly and telling the designers to run after them to clean up the visuals without making major changes, so they might as well be building to a spec.

3) a UX firm mapping out how the product works before handing off to peon engineers that can't make major changes and might as well be building to a spec.

To end on a positive note, there is one other solution to expertise, by the way. It's grouping teams by product, not role, and figuring out an interdisciplinary way to work together, rather than running the entire team by the methodology of one specialty. That way you're picking good ideas from across different processes and adapting to the company culture to boot. For example, TypeKit does daily stand ups at 10:05am every day and that's an aspect of agile that they've liked enough to use for the whole company, but I'd be surprised if their designers were checking their art assets into Pivotal Tracker or the programmers were writing up UX journey maps of each user persona.

Steve Jobs always liked to describe Apple as the biggest startup he knew and a more accurate description would be that it's a collection of startups, with each one focused on a single product. Seems to work pretty well for them.

EDIT: fixed a few formatting errors.

JanezStupar• 15 years ago

I agree with you that any kind of process sucks when a team doesn't really know what they are doing.

And by using a methodology you are saying just that "we have no fucking clue, so we will try it this way that person X sol us".

I have debated agile proponents about whether agile would work in their respective organizations on multiple occasions. Usually I argue it would fail just as much as any other approach?

Why? Because people try to adhere to it strictly and completely miss or ignore their current context, which is usually THE problem they are trying to solve in the first place.

And you are dead wrong about waterfall. Waterfall is not even a methodology. Anyone selling himself as an "methodology expert" while trying to sell you on "waterfall methodology" is a quack and a fraud. Anyone talking about waterfall as a possible methodology is a quack and a fraud who knows nothing about methodologies. Because waterfall is not a methodology, just like adding rat poison to kids candy is not a business model. Waterfall has always, since the very beginning of the term, been an anti pattern a "anti-methodology".

peteforde• 15 years ago

My founding business partner Ryan McMinn spoke at an open source conference in Toronto a few years ago. In the talk he explained how and why we built Unspace the way that we did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIQIZ0NIkxk

He talks extensively about the need to work directly with the end users of the system, instead of the management. The realization that specifications are usually nothing more than mutually assured destruction.

Pretty much the only thing that's changed in five years is that the scale of our company has grown, and now we do indeed have contracts with our clients to protect us from bad things.

Anyhow, I highly recommend the video if you're looking for an in-the-trenches perspective.

nickfrost• 15 years ago

Thank you @JoshSusser for finding this diamond in the rough. What would we do without waterfall development!?

jhrobert• 15 years ago

The problem with both waterfall and agile is that we are missing the definition of "the Humble process" to develop software.

Unfortunately humility does not sell so well.

buff-a2• 15 years ago

In an ideal world, Waterfall will lead to a worse product than an iterative one. We don't live in the real world, and I expect these guys deal with clients who regularly fall into the -from-hell[1] category. I would bet that many people posting here aren't running consultancies and don't have experience with such clients (or any clients).

In such a situation, it is in fact entirely rational to develop a lightweight, low cost UI that a non-technical person can commit to, i.e. sign a contract. The developer can then go off and implement it with a very clear legal case if the client then chooses not to pay because "its not what we wanted".

Its not what I do, and I know that many here take a more involved approach to their clients, but its undeniable that it is a successful business model, and in some cases I believe it can produce some result where otherwise there might be none. Equally I'm sure it produces results that are ultimately not used, but where the company still gets paid.

[1] http://clientsfromhell.net/

Morendil• 15 years ago

What I love best is this testimonial praising the book:

> Helms and Valberg lay out an innovative methodology that finally delivers on the promise of Agile Development.

reledi2• 15 years ago

Epicenter is sending out some annoyed tweets while defending the AgileUX movement. They claim their process is nothing like waterfall as it focuses on iterative UX prototyping.

https://twitter.com/epicenternyc

We've invented waterfall

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