Oh yes, everyone know that waterfall works and the rest sucks, nice
If the shoe fits …
A good team can make any of these strategies work. A bad team will make a mockery out of them all. Most teams are neither good or bad, and stumble forward, or backwards, doing the motions
More accurately the waterfall mission ends up on Phobos only to have to scramble to figure out how to land on Titan because the customer can’t tell the difference between moons
These are all accurate, except the first Waterfall one, who also doesn’t go to Mars.
Right. They design the whole rocket, spend years to build the rocket exactly according to the design doc, then the rocket explodes on the launchpad and they have to start all over.
That’s why testing comes before launching.
So, we need waterfall testing to be separated?
Waterfall is more like: You want to go to Mars. You start to build the rocket. Managers that don’t know anything about building a rocket starts having meetings to tell the engineers who do know how to build a rocket what they should be doing. Management decides to launch the rocket based on a timeline that’s not based in reality. Management tries to launch the rocket based on the timeline instead of when it’s actually finished. Rocket explodes. Management blames the engineers.
The various methodologies don’t actually change what the engineers need to do. But some of them can be effective at requiring more effort from management to interfere in the project. Bad managers are lazy so they’re not going to write a card, so they can be somewhat effective in neutralizing micromanagement. I say somewhat, because bad management will eventually find a way to screw things up.
What’s not covered is the 25 years of R&D in advance of waterfall project starting, or that it’s delivered 200% over time and cost due to those requirements being insufficient and based on assumptions that were never or are no longer true.
A software engineer was not involved in this if waterfall is painted positively.
I think the last time I heard an engineer unironically advocating for a waterfall IRL was about a decade ago and they were the one of the crab-in-a-bucket, I-refuse-to-learn-anything-new types—with that being the very obvious motivation for their push-back.
Waterfall: Spend 10 years compiling written functional and technical requirements. Cancel the program due to budget overrun.
Yeah, waterfall would be “you collect requirements to build a rocket to Mars, 2 years later you have a rocket to Venus and it turns out they didn’t think oxygen is essential, they’ll have to add that in the next major release.”
And here I am, running projects for the past 20 years mostly using agile, and still very much unconvinced about its supposed superiority over waterfall.
Test-driven development: You spend all your time building a gizmo to tell you if you’re on Mars or not. A week before the deadline you start frantically building a rocket.
Seems like the author has never programmed anything
I’m getting pretty old so I have experienced multiple waterfall projects. The comic should be
You want to go to mars You spend 3 months designing a rocket You spend 6 months building a rocket You spend a month testing the rocket and notice there is a critical desing flaw.
You start over again with a new design and work on it for 2 months You spend another 6 months building it You spend 2 months testing
Rocket works fine now, but multiple other companies already have been to Mars, so no need to even go anymore.
This is the perfect waterfall analogy.
This is the way
I’m glad I’m not alone. I couldn’t make sense of this comic.
pretty sure they’re saying waterfall for building a rocket because that’s literally how NASA builds a rocket, including the software. It’s terrible for building anything other than a rocket though, because the stakes aren’t high for most other projects, at least not in the way that a critical mistake will be incredibly bad.
i take you have never heard of the V-model. basically you climb the waterfall back up to verify everything. most things that fly within the atmosphere are done that way. pretty sure NASA would do the same.
You’re right I haven’t heard of that model, but NASA has documented pretty well that it follows waterfall. https://appel.nasa.gov/2018/11/27/spotlight-on-lessons-learned-aligning-system-development-models-with-insight-approaches/
You can assume people here know what waterfall and the V model are.
Depends. I’ve heard management talk about agile and waterfall, but I’ve not heard even one manager say V model.
Scrum is about transparency, not intransparency for a month
Scrum is not about any of the things that Scrum proponents claim it’s about.
Specifically, it’s not about agility, it’s not about velocity, it’s not about quality, it’s not about including the “customer”, and it’s only about a kind of transparency that has absolutely no impact on the final product.
But yeah, it’s about some kind of transparency.
Specifically, you would have to put in effort to be more wrong.
Go read the scrum manifest.
In reality, companies always adapt for what they think suits them. Very rarely do you actually use scrum completely as intended, that’s fine. But you don’t blame the cow when the cook burned your steak. You blame the cook.
Oh, Scrum has a manifesto now? Where is it?
Or you meant the Agile manifesto, that Scrum breaks half the items and does nothing about the other half?
Perhaps poorly translated, they call it the scrum guide in English
https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html
I don’t know what parts you are talking about since you’re not specific.
Furthermore. Kanban is just a method of keeping track of who does what and what the progress of that is. You can use kanban in waterfall. You can use kanban in scrum. No one is just using kanban and nothing else. As your post seems to think.
Seems biased… What’s that logo they’re trying to hide in the top-right?
Must be OP trying to hide it, Toggl displayed it proudly. The author used to work for Toggl marketing and ask can be seen from this post, did an excellent job. He still has a webcomic, it’s just not marketing for Toggl anymore. Here it is
As for bias - it’s a time tracking tool, but I don’t think they actually shill for waterfall, I think it’s just poking fun at the agile methodologies.
I heard nasa used to do some kind of TDD lol
