[nenadst]

15 years after Scrum was invented and 10 years after the Agile Manifesto someone writes such an article ?

I agree that knowledge about Agile was not widespread enough in 2011, but this reads like something from the early 90s.

[mrweasel]

This might just be me not keeping up with the details, as I pretty much lost all interest in development methodologies after eXtreme Programming 20 years ago. It's all the same, either waterfall or some rehash of the iterative programming models of the 1960es and 1970es. Hell, even waterfall is suppose to have iterative elements, most just skip that part.

Business want Scrum, Agile, whatever, because it allows them to change their mind, but they also want the deadline of waterfall development. Clearly some "pure" form of agile is better, if you care about the quality of the outcome. When you have deadline and fixed budgets, the idea that you don't truly know when you're done rules out anything but waterfall, where all requirements are to be laid out in advance.

Deadlines and budgets are why bad requirements happen. Almost no one is able to write good requirements, it's simply too difficult in all but the most basic cases.

[hinkley]

I’ve heard it said that Scrum only works if you assume half of XP. I don’t have a coherent counter argument to that statement.

> Deadlines and budgets are why bad requirements happen. Almost no one is able to write good requirements, it's simply too difficult in all but the most basic cases.

Because projects get cancelled if you tell the truth. Even if there’s an uglier truth that the company is screwed if we don’t finish this project.

One boss referred to this somewhat grotesquely as “getting them pregnant.” Once started, sunk cost fallacy makes them keep dumping more money on it until they get what they need or the pain gets too high. In a lot of ways Agile is a more humane way of getting the same results without the deception. You give them a taste of things to come and keep trickling it out a bit at a time.