Congrats! You just rediscovered something called water-fall model.

Waterfall was bad due to the excessively long feedback loops (months-to-years from "planning" to "customer gets to see it/ we receive feedback on it"). It was NOT bad because it forced people to think before writing code! That part we should recover, it's not problematic at all.

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kown7 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

If people actually read the original paper by Royce 1970 they would see that it's an iterative process with short feedback-loops.

The bad rep comes from (defense|gov.) contracting, where PRDs where connected to money and CR were expensive, see http://www.bawiki.com/wiki/Waterfall.html for better details.

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paganel 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

When you do most of the thinking before you start implementing the whole thing, and if you think that that's enough, then you've missed the unknown unknowns part, which was a big talking point in the mid 2000s, back when the anti-waterfall discourse got going (and for good reason).

But I expect the AI zealots to start (re-)integrating XProgramming (later rebranded as Agile) back into their workflow, somehow.

	▲	sersi 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thinking before you start implementing the entire project is doomed to fail. Thinking before you implement each features/user story is usually rather important. A waterfall model with short feedback loops iterating on small tasks is not the worst thing in the world

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lores 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's not what's considered waterfall, though. Specs are always required for any work, even if they're only in your head, even if the work takes 15 minutes. It's the length of the feedback loop and the resistance to spec change that makes waterfall, and by his use of tracer bullets I very much doubt it's the case here, if there was any doubt at all to have.

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senko 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did you know that agile is just waterfall scaled down to two weeks? Now you know!

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FairlySadPanda 3 days ago | parent [-]

No /s here so just in case this is a serious point:

Agile is a set of four principles for software development.

Scrum is the two-week development window thing, but Scrum doesn't mandate a two week _release_ window, it mandates a two week cadence of planning and progress review with a focus on doing small chunks of achievable work rather than mega-projects.

Scrum prefers lots of one-to-three day projects generally, I've yet to see training on Scrum that does not warn off of repeatedly picking up two-week jobs. If that's been your experience, you should review how you can break work down more to get to "done" on bits of it faster.

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senko 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

All good points here (and yeah I didn't add /s, hopefully "now you know!" was sufficiently obvious over-the-top).

All that said, in most orgs I've worked with, they were following agile processes over agile principles - effectively a waterfall with a scrum-master and dailies.

This is not to diss the idea of agile, just an observation that most good ideas, once through the business process MBA grinder, end up feeling quite different.

	▲	TeMPOraL 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> All that said, in most orgs I've worked with, they were following agile processes over agile principles - effectively a waterfall with a scrum-master and dailies. In my experience, they're all waterfall in scrum skin, except they also lose the one thing that was a strength of the old-school method: building up a large, well thought out, thoroughly checked spec up front. So in the end, "business process MBA grinder" reshapes any idea to adapt to leadership needs - and so here, Agile became all about the things that make software people predictable cogs in the larger corporate planning machine. They got what they need anyway, but we threw away the bits that were useful to us.

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azangru 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Agile is a set of four principles

Twelve :-) Twelve principles and four values

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hansmayer 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

:) I keep saying it - the AI will cost us all dearly, but not in the ways the AI boosters are saying it will....