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One of the problems people are having is that so much is said against Waterfall instead of just in favor of Agile or its spinoffs. People emphasize that everything to do with Waterfall is bad, and generalize from large, detailed, inflexible architecture with no feedback loops being bad. They often end up, repeated by people trained to be Scrum Masters or some other management or administrative role who are not developers themselves, hearing about all preplanning being bad and evoking waterfall.

I've been told that gating one story behind another is waterfall. I've been told that having a design story is waterfall. I've been told that architecture documents that are eligible to be revised as the system is built but created before all the code is in place are waterfall. This sort of backlash taken to heart means that anything larger than a developer can do in two weeks is infeasible. This often happens when the team building the software is not considered among the stakeholders of the team's output.

There's a sharp focus on shippable improvements. Well, to me a plugin system is a shippable improvement even if there's no plugins for it yet. A data flow diagram from this week people can use to determine which parts to build next week is an improvement. This isn't a multi-year pre-planned development schedule. This is just having some idea how to integrate the software.



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