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Is Waterfall Coming Back? Sort Of. Not Really. Both — And the Bigger Question Underneath. (blog.herlein.com)

submitted 17 hours ago by codeinabox@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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[–] codeinabox@programming.dev 6 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Freeposity@lemmy.world 8 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

equate a fancier document with a better outcome

"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.

[–] bitfucker@programming.dev 2 points 16 hours ago

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

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 1 points 14 hours ago

A spec that’s more than a single page rarely survives initial contact with reality.

[–] dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 hours ago

Agile came from toyota? It wasnt invented by software companies