Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "Creator Of Agile Manifesto Doesn't Like Agile???" video.

dave farley looked at how the report was done because it did not make sense, and totally ripped it to shreds for bad methodology. it was a report done to produce selling points for the book.
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no, waterfall was not a thought experiment, it was something that emerged by discovering that we also need to do x, then just tacking it on the end. the original paper said "this is what people are doing, and here is why it is a really bad idea". people then took the diagram from the original paper and used it as a how to document. the problem with it is that it cannot work for 60% of projects, and does not work very well for a lot of the others. they tried fixing it by making it nearly impossible to change the specs after the initial stage, and while it made sure projects got built, it ended up with a lot of stuff which was delivered obsolete due to the world changing and the specs staying the same. the agile manifesto occurred in direct response to this saying here is what we currently do, but if we do this instead, it works better, making incremental development work for the other 60%.
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no, it is there because as research proves, nearly 60% of projects cannot know the exact specifications until after they start trying to build it and find that it does not fit what they thought they needed. that is not incompetence, it is reality, and you need some way to adapt as you discover these differences.
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people feel nostalgia for it because it was what they learned first, and because if you only work on the 40% of projects it can work for, it can be good enough. people don't like it because it does not work at all for 60% of projects, and for the rest it often is not good enough.
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the problem with pure communism, shared by pure capitalism, is that they don't work. in any practical system you have to balance the needs of the investors, the workers, and the customers. the customers want stuff as cheap as possible, the workers want higher pay for easier or reduced work, and the investors want the best profit from the investment. there is an idea not often taught called the principal of enlightened self interest, where you set the price at the highest price which does not harm sales, and then split the profits between the investors and the workers. this gives you a sweet spot, where everyone gets the optimal deal. any deviation from that sweet spot harms the interest of at least one of the three groups.
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that is just not true. the agile manifesto was a response to persistently failing projects. those there were very experienced, and identified a small set of practices which the failures had in common, and basically said if you do this instead, it often works better, but tailor the specific things to what works best for you. the problem comes when someone takes that short list of things that often work better, and turn it into 300 page books, without even thinking about if or when it works better, and why it works when it does. that is not a problem with the manifesto.
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waterfall can work as described under exactly one scenario, when you know exactly what you need the specs to be, like in the nasa case mentioned in the video. the problem is that this is amazingly expensive when you can do it, and evidence going all the way back to the original paper point out that for something like 60% of projects even the customer does not know what they need, so it fails miserably. also, it cannot cope well with changing requirements. this lead to the myth of change control as a way to deal with those cases. this resulted in product being built, but they were increasingly wrong, as you could not react to the changing needs. when the manifesto was created, it was realised that it was not working, and that you needed to do incremental development, and the manifesto was a writeup of why it does not work, and what to do instead to work incrementally. if you do it properly like the companies in the dora state of devops report, agile works, but too many companies don't even learn enough about agile to be able to tell if they are really doing it, resulting in some sort of mangled waterfall process.
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