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Thursday, December 1, 2011

Defining Watergile

At the place of my current employment we've had a layer of management placed above us that fervently preaches the mightiness of agile. This management devotes much lecture time into informing us the proper procedure of planning a product. First you gather requirements and architect the entire system and write detailed requirements documents - good enough that developers don't need to refine them any further and QA knows exactly what to test. When requirements are written for the entire system - 12-24 months in advance - then you begin coding. After you're done coding, QA begins to test.

To be clear, anyone reading the previous paragraph should be scratching their head and thinking to themself, "gee, that sounds a lot like waterfall". Well it is, hence the portmanteau watergile (we considered agilfall but it just doesn't roll off the tongue as well).

The trouble is, even though we coined the term just recently, this watergile thing is a frigging pandemic. Every time I crack open a fresh copy of SD Times there seems to be some guy telling you that you need to be measuring KSLOC and a billion other software metrics but at the same time claiming that agile is the only way. It wouldn't be so scary except that this is the source of direction for software development managers.

It's no wonder watergile is so widespread, IT managers are fed a constant stream of B.S. mixed messages. How could anyone make sense of any of it without dismissing most of it? The truth is, waterfall is hard and so is agile. Anything in between is just ad-hoc and setup to fail. If you are a development manager and reading this, find those tech magazines on the corner of your desk and show them to the recycling bin. They're worthless and distracting to progress.

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