Comment by aglavine

Comment by aglavine 21 hours ago

No.

Agile core is the feedback loop. I can't believe people still don't get it. Feedback from reality is always faster than guessing on the air.

Waterfall is never great. The only time when you need something else than Agile is when lives are at stake, you need there formal specifications and rigorous testing.

SDD allows better output than traditional programming. It is similar to waterfall in the sense that the model helps you to write design docs in hours instead of days and take more into account as a result. But the feedback loop is there and it is still the key part in the process.

0xbadcafebee 7 hours ago

> Feedback from reality is always faster than guessing on the air

Only if you have no idea what the results will be.

Professional engineering takes parts with specific tolerances, tested for a specific application, using a tried-and-true design, combines them into the solution that other people have already made, and watches it work, exactly as predicted. That's how we can build a skyscraper "the first time" and have it not fall down. We don't need to build 20 tiny versions of a building until we get a working skyscraper.

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keyle 20 hours ago

I've live through both eras...

Agile, hardly any planning, write 3 times.

Waterfall, weeks of planning, write 3 times anyway.

The point is, people don't know what they want or are asking for, until it's in front of them. No system is perfect, but waterfall leads to bigger disasters.

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AdamN 18 hours ago

Any real software (that delivers value over time) is constantly rewritten and that's a good thing. The question is whether the same people are rewriting it that wrote it and what percentage of that rewriting is based off of a spec or based off of feedback from elsewhere in the system.

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jll29 21 hours ago

> The only time when you need something else than Agile is when lives are at stake, you need there formal specifications and rigorous testing.

Lives are always at stake, given that we use software everywhere, and often in unintended ways, even outside its spec (isn't that a definition of a "hack"?).

People think of medical appliance software, space/air traffic software, defense systems or real-time embedded systems as the only environments where "lives are stake", but actually, in subtle ways, a violation of user expectancy (in some software companies, UX issues count as serious bugs) in a Word processor, Web browser or the sort command can kill a human.

Two real-life examples:

(1) a few years ago, a Chinese factory worker was killed by a robot. It was not in the spec that a human could ever walk in the robot's path (the first attested example of "AI" killing a human that I found at the time). This was way before deep larning entered the stage, and the factory was a closed and fully automated environment.

(2) Also a few years back, the Dutch software for social benefits management screwed up, and thousands of families just did not get pay out any money at all for an extended period. Allegedly, this led to starvations (I don't have details - but if any Dutch read this, please share), and eventually a whole Dutch government was forced to resign over the scandal.

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agentultra 18 hours ago

That's a very narrow definition of engineering. What about property? Sensitive information?
It's a fine "whoopsie-doodle," when your software erases the life savings of a few thousand people. "We'll fix that in the next release," is already too little, too late.

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