[moribvndvs]

In the nearly 30 years of doing this, I’ve had more success delivering good quality software that meets business requirements under waterfall than any of the SCRUM implementations I’ve worked with, and I am saying that without disagreeing that waterfall has its problems. In the agile space, kanban is the only one I’ve felt is productive, but it has trouble scaling to multiple teams.

[Clubber]

In my experience, waterfall forces business to think more about the project and plan accordingly. They have to think about how this feature interacts with this other feature. Business also usually has a better understanding of how the software will work because of the planning phase.

In my experience, with 2 week sprints, the business doesn't really have to think about anything outside of bite sized chunks or even how those bite sized chunks affect later bite sized chunks. They can make a snap decision without thinking about it because it can be rectified in the next sprint. Almost no-one has a "big picture," view of the software.

Before agile, we essentially did 4 releases a month (this was back on the burn a CD days), 2 major releases and 2 minor patch releases. It worked really well and we didn't get the burnout as much by sprinting a marathon. With sprints, I always feel burned out. No sense of accomplishment, no letup, working hard just gets you more work. It's like laying bricks one at a time on a wall with unlimited length.

[ben7799]

Waterfall forces management to get it's act together. These processes are all about giving management more power and less accountability.

Product Management has fallen a tremendous distance from where it used to be. PMs who have come up completely under Scrum seem to think stories and epics barely require more than 1-2 sentences and the developers should have to figure everything out from there.

Even senior people in their early 40s have completely forgotten how to specify or document anything well.

It makes me wish I worked on something that involved physical products. The whole thing with agile/scrum is that management can change their mind at any time for any reason and the process gives them justification. It works in pure software, it doesn't work in anything physical because they had to sign the POs to buy materials and parts.

[gtirloni]

> No sense of accomplishment, no letup, working hard just gets you more work. It's like laying bricks one at a time on a wall with unlimited length.

Also feeling bad every 2 weeks because planning was really bad and now you need to say you're sorry the task has to roll over the next sprint and your manager has to explain to their manager, etc, etc.

[marcosdumay]

Yep. Somehow scrum leads to more rigid specifications than waterfall.

[Clubber]

>Before agile, we essentially did 4 releases a month

Correction, 4 releases a year, or one every 3 months.