Waterfall is more like: You want to go to Mars. You start to build the rocket. Managers that don’t know anything about building a rocket starts having meetings to tell the engineers who do know how to build a rocket what they should be doing. Management decides to launch the rocket based on a timeline that’s not based in reality. Management tries to launch the rocket based on the timeline instead of when it’s actually finished. Rocket explodes. Management blames the engineers.
The various methodologies don’t actually change what the engineers need to do. But some of them can be effective at requiring more effort from management to interfere in the project. Bad managers are lazy so they’re not going to write a card, so they can be somewhat effective in neutralizing micromanagement. I say somewhat, because bad management will eventually find a way to screw things up.
Waterfall: Boeing/ULA does this. Their rockets cost $4B per launch, don’t work, strand astronauts. Maybe the next repair/test cycle, if management’s dumb enough to keep paying them.
Agile at least launches something.
Test-driven development: You spend all your time building a gizmo to tell you if you’re on Mars or not. A week before the deadline you start frantically building a rocket.
Yeah, but waterfall requires that management knows what they want. It’s impossible!
This but unironically
I don’t think that they were being ironic…
Old man yells at cloud these damn Americans using “ironic” when they mean “sarcastic”
Sarcasm is a type of irony.
A software engineer was not involved in this if waterfall is painted positively.
I think the last time I heard an engineer unironically advocating for a waterfall IRL was about a decade ago and they were the one of the crab-in-a-bucket, I-refuse-to-learn-anything-new types—with that being the very obvious motivation for their push-back.
And here I am, running projects for the past 20 years mostly using agile, and still very much unconvinced about its supposed superiority over waterfall.
These are all accurate, except the first Waterfall one, who also doesn’t go to Mars.
Right. They design the whole rocket, spend years to build the rocket exactly according to the design doc, then the rocket explodes on the launchpad and they have to start all over.
That’s why testing comes before launching.
The build phase took too much time, you now have 1 day to test all the features and design elements of the rocket, because launch day is tomorrow. Good luck!
I heard nasa used to do some kind of TDD lol
Waterfall only works if the programmer knows what the client needs. Usually it goes like:
- Client has a need
- Client describes what they think they need to a salesperson
- Salesperson describes to the product manager what an amazing deal they just made
- Product manager panics and tries to quickly specify the product they think sales just sold
- Developers write the program they think product manager is describing
- The program doesn’t think. It just does whatever buggy mess the programmer just wrote
- The client is disappointed, because the program doesn’t solve their needs
- Eventually Company decides “agile will fix things”
- Developers are told to work agile but the only stakeholder they talk to is the PO, who talks to PM, who talks to Sales, who talks to Customers
- PM&Sales don’t want to deliver an unfinished/unpolished product so they give a review every sprint, by themselves, based on what they think the customer wants (they are Very Clever)
- A year or two later the project is delivered and the customer is predictably unhappy.
- Management says “how could this have happened!” and does it all over again.
as someone who has made it through multiple ‘agile transformations’ in large companies: that’s how it usually goes.
however, that is the problem with people being stuck in their way and people afraid of loosing their jobs. PO is usually filled with the previous teamlead (lower management, maybe in charge of 20 ppl). PM & Sales have to start delivering unfinished Products! how else are you going to get customer feedback while you can still cheaply change things? A lot of the middle management has to take something they would perceive as a ‘demotion’ or find new jobs entirely - who would have guessed that with an entirely new model you cannot map each piece 1:1…
Given these and many more problems i have seen many weird things: circles within circles within circles, many tiny waterfalls… some purists would call SAFE a perversion of agile.
the point is: if you want to go agile, you have to change (who would have thought that slapping a different sticker won’t do it?). the change has to start from the top. many companies try to do an ‘agile experiment’: the whole company is still doing what they do. however, one team does agile now - while still having to deliver in and for the old system…
They forgot the bit where the Waterfall method blew through the budget and deadline about five times over.
Seems like the author has never programmed anything
I’m getting pretty old so I have experienced multiple waterfall projects. The comic should be
You want to go to mars You spend 3 months designing a rocket You spend 6 months building a rocket You spend a month testing the rocket and notice there is a critical desing flaw.
You start over again with a new design and work on it for 2 months You spend another 6 months building it You spend 2 months testing
Rocket works fine now, but multiple other companies already have been to Mars, so no need to even go anymore.
This is the way
This is the perfect waterfall analogy.
pretty sure they’re saying waterfall for building a rocket because that’s literally how NASA builds a rocket, including the software. It’s terrible for building anything other than a rocket though, because the stakes aren’t high for most other projects, at least not in the way that a critical mistake will be incredibly bad.
i take you have never heard of the V-model. basically you climb the waterfall back up to verify everything. most things that fly within the atmosphere are done that way. pretty sure NASA would do the same.
You can assume people here know what waterfall and the V model are.
