Out Of The Mouths Of Clients

[suityou01]

Don't fall into the monochromatic SDLC=Good;Everything else=Evil way of thinking.

eg:

Not all projects are the same, so treat them differently

Save your breath, most on here can't spell SDLC.

[SpontaneousOrder]

'Agile' is about fostering agility. It says nothing about what you should and should not do - only that particular project types (most) may benefit from agility over up-front central planning, and suggests what priorities may or may not, in an entirely context-dependent fashion, promote or undermine that agility.

That's all.

Now, *if* you think that not designing everything up front is a good idea because the market is dynamic and you don't know for sure the full design will still be relevant in a year's time, then perhaps you don't want to design everything up front. Perhaps you *do* want to design the core of your solution to ensure that it's pluggable, flexible, scalable, etc? In preparation for the unknown.

*If* you're testing the market by putting out a product and seeing the response, then perhaps you don't want to design it all up front, and perhaps you want to be able to change direction very quickly as you;re expecting to have to change tack a few times before you hit the sweet spot.


The realty is that a huge number of projects fail (officially or implicitly) for those reasons, and 'agile' is a recognition that some of the thing we often do are digging us into a hole that is impossible to climb out of, should we be unfortunate enough to fall in. Worse than that, sometime we should expect to fall into that hole once or twice.

Saying 'agile' doesn't work is like saying flip-flops are unsuitable footware.

[malvolio]

Many years ago I created ECNIRP, essentially Prince in Reverse (or Prince as it is usually done, to be more accurate), where you start with Execution and proceed through the various steps back to Planning. Never really caught on at the time, but real life has clearly caught up...

Anyway Agile is brilliant at what it does - then again, so is Prince and its brethren - but it has to sit inside a waterfall plan, else how do you know when you've arrived? They are not opposing methodologies, they are complementary.

HTH. BIDI...

[mudskipper]

I created FUDGE and FUMBLE - and have used both to great success throughout my career

[NotAllThere]

I tend to use MIUAIGA*. Most people do, in the final analysis.




* Make It Up As I Go Along

[DimPrawn]

I created FUDGE and FUMBLE - and have used both to great success throughout my career

I like a good FUMBLE, but not so keen on ending up in the FUDGE.

HTH BIDI