[t_luke]

It’s fairly obviously designed to avoid the issues which almost caused the cancellation of the new Edinburgh tram — spiralling costs caused by the need to move existing utilities under the deep track base. That crisis was probably as much to do with a badly formed set of contracts as with the technical issues themselves, but it’s still worth designing out.

[bobthepanda]

Avoiding relocating utilities is only really a stopgap until the utilities reach end of life at which point you would be ripping up the newly installed trackbed during the middle of its life.

At least in the US utility relocation also generally involves moving what was underneath to the side, so it can be accessed without disrupting the new transit line.

[coryrc]

You can leave what's there and run new ones.

[robocat]

Contracts that lock in a waterfall process.

At last they were not trying to use agile!

[chgs]

I do wonder how much of the backlash against agile is driven by people who never experienced waterfall

[sevensor]

Either one of fine as long as you are doing it and not having it done to you. In the latter case, waterfall will crush your soul under a stack of binders, while agile is death by a thousand cuts.

[MobiusHorizons]

That’s a really excellent insight! I’m going to use that!

Another common pitfall seems to be engineering teams choosing agile when the business engagement model is waterfall. This puts you in the unfortunate situation of trying to change requirements without being able to get paid for those changes.

[mannykannot]

The key issue appears to be how long it took to realize that existing infrastructure would present a showstopping cost. In practice, waterfall and agile are virtually indistinguishable in their ability to anticipate such issues early - they can, but doing so depends on factors independent of the differences in methodology.

[pydry]

Or who only experienced waterfall, which was always branded as agile.

[95014_refugee]

I do wonder how much of the hate on “waterfall” is perpetuated by folks that never read the paper. It’s the “socialism” of development workflows…

[robocat]

Yeah, I was just being cheeky because I was trying to imagine software development models applied to large planned infrastructure.

A nuclear power station built successfully using an Agile process would be something I'd like to read about.