Agile Vs Waterfall

In the last few years, I see more and more companies in Sydney shift towards Agile approach and away from Waterfall. Nothing wrong with that.

What I don’t quite understand is why the Waterfall approach gets slaughtered in the proces. As soon as the designers make the move, they list all the things that are wrong with Waterfall.

Let me put it this way: Waterfall has been around a lot longer than Agile, and people did just fine. In fact, a lot of great projects – most projects in the world have been created using Waterfall.

But apparently, now the view is that you can’t create anything worthwhile in Waterfall. It’s outdated. It’s old fashioned. It slows us down. It’s a dinosaur. It’s dead.

It makes me think of how architects used to work in the middle ages. A building, especially a large and complex one such as a cathedral, would take a long time to build. Sometimes the head architect would be replaced in the process. Sometimes he died, other times he was poached by a neighbouring kingdom – whatever the reason, there were times when a new architect came when the project was already well under way.

What did the new architect do? Did he erase the old structure and started building from scratch because he had better ideas? No. He took his ideas and applied them the to what was already there. He continued building on, adding to the existing structure. He integrated his ideas with what was build before.

So how come we are not doing that anymore? As soon as something new comes along, we demolish whatever was before. How about we learn from it, and build on it?

What I hear a lot from professionals in the field is blame. The projects wasn’t successful because the approach is bad. Sometimes they say that even before the project has started! The project will fail, or at least, not make any splash, because it’s the old methodology, old approach.

But the thing is, it’s not about approach. Our job is, as it always has been, to do great work. The approach, or the medium is irrelevant. Picasso did it with paint, Michelangelo with marble, Bill Bernbach did it in advertising, Hundertwasser did it in architecture. Do you think that if they didn’t have access to their medium, they wouldn’t have created anything? I think they would have picked a different medium, different approach, and created something great anyway.

So why do we spend our time worrying about whether we are Agile or Waterfall? We are not in either of those camps, not if we are any good. We are in creativity. We are in problem solving.

We won’t know the future until it gets here. So anyone who is predicting the death of anything is pretending to have knowledge he or she doesn’t have. All we know is, stuff changes. And we will adapt.

It’s not whether we use Agile or Waterfall. It’s whether we take responsibility for the work we produce.