[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."