We all knew it
One standout statistic was that projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed.
I’d like to work in that company.
That’s because they forgot the meaning of the word agility and want to apply the rules what ever the cost
And also because it’s a comfortable cover up for any kind of money saving stupidity. We don’t need proper requirements engineering, we’re agile. We don’t need an operations team we’re doing an agile DevOps approach. We don’t need frontend Devs, we’re an agile team you all need to be full stack. I have often seen agility as an excuse to push more works towards the devs who aren’t trained to do any of those tasks.
Also common problem is that still tons of people believe agile means unplanned. This definitely also contributes to projects failing that are just agile by name.
100% my experience.
Cries in waterfall.
If you know exactly what you need, then specs are great. Proven solutions for known problems are awesome. Agile is pointless in that circumstance.
But I can count on one hand the number of times stakeholders, or clients, actually know what they want ahead of time and accept what was built to spec with no amends.
When there is any uncertainty, changing a spec under waterfall is significantly worse. Contract negotion in fixed price is a fucking nightmare of the client insisting the sky is red.
Personally, I was never great with agile projects. I get that it’s good for most and sort of used it when I was a CTO but as a solo developer, there are days when I’d rather eat a bowl of hair than write code and then some days, I’ll work all night because I got inspired to finish a whole feature.
I realize I’m probably an exception that maybe proves the rule but I loathed daily stand-ups. Most people probably need the structure. I was more of a “Give me a goal and a deadline and leave me alone, especially at 9am.” person. (Relatedly, I was also a terrible high school student and amazing at college. Give me a book and a paper to write and you’ll have your paper. If you have daily bullshit and participation points, I’ll do enough to pass but no more.)
Stand-ups can become so proforma. What did you do yesterday? I coded. What are you doing today? I am going to code. Do you have any blockers? No. It gets a little repetitive after a while.
I found them to be useful because I usee to be in an erratic team where people either get a lot done or drag projects on for years. At least the project draggers had no place to hide when needing to report their project daily.
In my current job we only have these stand-up type meetings once weekly which made a big difference because many people had more interesting things to report and it wasn’t some kind of lip service, instead people were genuinely haring progress.
I did twice a week when I was management: once at the start of a sprint, once on the first Friday where we only identified blockers, and once the following Wednesday where we talked about what can ship and be ready for QA.
The goal was to have a release fully ready on Thursday so Friday could be for emergency bug fixes but most releases are fine. If everything is perfect, great! Everyone go have a three day weekend. If QA catches a bug or two, we fix it and then ship.
If a deadline is gonna slip, just tell me when you know. It’s not usually a big deal.
