I saw this tweet come through on my RSS reader and felt I had to respond. Thankfully Rich told us that he was being sarcastic, however, I’ve seen real misconceptions like this come up many times over the past few months. So, let’s clear this one up shall we?
There are many major differences between waterfall and Agile, the first being that waterfall is a methodology, whereas Agile, as described in the Agile Manifesto, is a set of principles. Scrum, XP, Crystal, and all the others, are methodologies; they are manifestations of Agile. But we’re talking Agile here, not Agile methodologies.
Agile came about because methods like waterfall didn’t allow for a high level of customer involvement, or change. It was thought that by having all of the requirements detailed up front, we could reduce the risks inherent in software projects. As the pace of our world has increased to fever pitch, and companies are competing on Internet time, this has been proven to be false. Risk is ever present. So to reduce that risk, business must be able to respond to changing customer needs and wants very quickly. Taking weeks to months to document what we think our customers want no longer works. We need to get working software into their hands faster than our competition. And it needs to work right the first time.
And for an easy to digest explanation of Agile, please read Mike Cottmeyer’s post on explaining agile.
Other Posts That Might Interest You
