Pondering Agile…

Jay Kimble had a rant about the Waterfall process and here are some quotes from his post:

“I got into IT to program computers; I love programming. I didn’t get into IT so that I could write technical specifications. “

The first thing to hit us was the change control process which can be a fairly lengthy process… one size fits all; if you are deploying a small intranet site or a major mainframe change it all travels through the same process. Change management is absolutely essential (don’t get me wrong), but the problem has been that the company itself is reactive, so every mistake by someone ends up causing more paperwork for everyone else. Next we added Design docs, and from there who knows where, but we’re pretty much in full SLDC.

IMO, waterfall (SDLC) looks like “death by paperwork” to me.

I think Jay has a point here… These business management processes are overbearing and waste a lot of time. Just the other day I’ve spent two weeks updating a technical spec and only spent a week building the system. I could have done the system without updating the spec and would have saved two weeks, where we could have spent on additional features for the system.

tags: agile

Currently listening to: cevin fisher – it’s all good – Winamp *** 501. cevin fisher – it’s all good