[jcadam]

I've worked O&M on software in the defense industry. Never again.

On my current project, when development is done and we're officially transitioned over to "O&M", my employer either gives me a new project to work on or I'm leaving to do something else.

Oh, and I've come to the conclusion that civil servants are not capable of grasping any development methodology other than 'waterfall.' Trying to do 'agile' is an exercise in frustration. The bureaucrats say they want agile (buzzword!), but they really don't. Eventually you settle on doing 5-week 'mini-waterfalls' and calling it 'agile'. :/

[dragonwriter]

> Oh, and I've come to the conclusion that civil servants are not capable of grasping any development methodology other than 'waterfall.'

Civil servants are quite capable of understanding other development methodology. Civil servants actually involved in software development are often constrained by legal and regulatory regimes which no one in a substantively technical role has significant input into, which mandate procurement, risk-management, and approval processes which essentially mandate a high-level flow very similar to a completely non-iterative, cartoonish mockery of waterfall, and to the extent that they can attempt to implement more effective processes, they must do so within those constraints.

[Terr_]

I see it in private industry too, I just worked in 2-week sprints on something only to discover that all our "feedback" for the past six months was actually from (surprise!) the managers in the pipeline, who hadn't actually enabled the feature to be seen by real end-users.

Among many possible causes, two that come to mind:

1. Managers who (despite lip-service to the idea) refuse to take any incremental risks looking bad with negative feedback each sprint, and would rather risk one big failure-event.

2. Companies which have either very-convoluted procedures or who try to treat end-users as cheap interchangeable human-robots... Which means no change can ever be rolled out without exhaustive documentation and training plans. Therefore all changes have to be "big enough" to be worth it.

[enraged_camel]

It's not just civil servants who can't understand agile. Most non-software people can't. Which is totally normal and expected if you think about it: the agile movement started in software. You can't build a house or a plane using agile. It has to be waterfall.

[dragonwriter]

> It's not just civil servants who can't understand agile. Most non-software people can't. Which is totally normal and expected if you think about it: the agile movement started in software.

Agile is (to the extent it has concrete substance) very similar to Lean, which (while it has come to software) actually started in manufacturing and engineering of tangible products. The difference between the two is mainly that Lean has a much stronger culture (and has thus also produced a lot more tools) around validation of methods through measurement, and thus is a lot more woo-resistant than Agile, which has proven to be decidedly prone to devolving in exactly the same kind of one-size fits all, consultant-pushed, top-down methodologies without good feedback on what works in the particular environment that the Agile Manifesto was a response to.

> You can't build a house or a plane using agile. It has to be waterfall.

"Agile" and "waterfall" aren't opposed, agile is opposed to the idea that any one methodology -- Scrum as much as Waterfall -- can be selected as right for a team without reference to the particular team and context in which they are working. To the extent that it works in a particular context, waterfall can be Agile.

[enraged_camel]

Agile is the idea that requirements are always in flux, and therefore it's pointless to spend time upfront gathering requirements and writing specs and following those specs since there's a good chance they will have become irrelevant by the time the product ships. So agile says "just get something, anything, out the door as soon as possible, receive feedback, then keep revising."

Waterfall is the opposite approach, where you have a formal requirements gathering phase, then you commit everything into design docs, and follow those docs with as few changes as possible. It's similar to how a house is built: first you check your local zoning laws, then have an architect draw the plans, then dig a hole and build a foundation, then build the skeleton, the walls, etc. You don't tell the client, "hey, we just dug the hole for the foundation, come live in it for a few weeks and give us feedback so we know what part to build next."

[pc86]

> You can't build a house or a plane using agile. It has to be waterfall.

If you can build a car with it,[0] I'm sure you can build a plane.

[0] http://wikispeed.org/