This page seeks to give you an idea what to expect from my talk on "The Real Difference between Agile and Waterfall".

Most of the Agile I see in real life is more like mini-waterfalls (assuming I don't see something that is not Agile at all). I get to see very little of what I consider as Real Agile. And the sad thing is, most people who think they are doing real Agile don't know they aren't.

This is, unfortunately, a by-product of the decision by its founders to focus only on the management flows, and subsequent success of Scrum as the Agile framework. It is not what Scrum was intended to be in software development.

Yes, and no. It all depends how you do it, AND what you count in “development time”.

First of all, good automated tests can “massage” your code every day, pretty much as often as desired. They will help the team find unintentional mistakes and thinking failures much earlier than without automation (most non-automated testing is done late in the development process). This allows much earlier correction (before problem accumulate) and also reduces the overall amount of bugs. So from this aspect, it can reduce the overall duration of the project very significantly.

If we write automated tests (unit, acceptance, integration, etc.) after the code is written, a lot of the manual work of coding is already done (design, coding, manual debugging, manual developer testing, etc.), so in this case the design and writing of the tests is an additional effort, and yes, in this case it increases the “development time” of the said piece of functionality. However, if done well, it can still reduce overall project effort and duration as mentioned earlier.

[Another blog post inspired by a Quora question. This time, "What are some reasons why Scrum might not be the best agile methodology to use on its own?"]

Never ever use Scrum alone. Always connect and combine it with other ideas and frameworks. Here’s why:

Scrum is intentionally incomplete. It ONLY provides a control framework for managing the decisions and realisation of chosen iterative and incremental outputs, to hopefully generate desired outcomes. It provides minimal structures for feedback loops to connect decisions to outcomes, and back to next decisions - both for the product being developed, and the process how that product is developed. And it gives three interrelated roles that “play the game of Scrum” and breath life into it.

[This post was inspired by a question in Quora - How can the waterfall method be incorporated into an agile software development environment? Is it possible to combine both methods or is it better to stick with one?]

Can I mix water with oil?

Sure, I can put them in the same container, but do they mix well?

[This blog was inspired by a question in Quora]

V model is a conceptual model between design/requirements/needs and confirmation of those needs in the system. In waterfall, it is interpreted, unfortunately, as a staged model, where each stage is completed before the next step. For example, we want to consider user needs and business requirements as a whole before going into smaller details. On the other side of the V we have the verification/validation steps to confirm that the system meets the identified capabilities. First we go down the left arm of the V, and then climb back up the right arm.

This is a logical model - think of the bigger picture before smaller details, and consider how to confirm the system works accordingly at the different stages. But in the way the waterfall approach uses it, there is a huuuuge assumption behind the staged model - that the identified requirements at each level DO NOT CHANGE during the deeper V stages. A lot of people using waterfall approaches do not seem to understand how critical that assumption is, and how huge the impact is to the successful use of the model.

Automation. If we look at the “economics” of testing, the value of testing is in the number of test cycles that can be run and the speed of how quickly they can be run after a modification. If we can run the tests very often and really fast, essentially after every modification, the cost of creating the tests (and test automation) becomes largely irrelevant.

The reverse is true in “traditional testing”. Because that testing, unfortunately, relies on significant amounts of human labor, it is very expensive to run. Any test comprehensive test run will take countless of hours of human work, and will take significant amounts of calendar time. As a consequence, it makes economic sense to collect a larger set of modifications to test at the same time. Because of time constraints, the actual tests executed will be optimised to most likely areas of failure, resulting in increased risk of regression errors going undetected in areas of lower scrutiny. It also, obviously, means that for many features the testing comes much after the actual development, and therefore decreases the value gained. And, I won’t even go into how bad humans are in repetitive testing. I was a test manager at one point doing exactly this, because I didn’t know anything better.

So, because of high costs of test execution, the focus is on the cost of testing, and that consideration trumps most other concerns. But the focus should instead be in the value seek to deliver through testing, and optimising that (as is the Agile credo in general).

[Context: This post is a quick copy/paste from a post in LinkedIn, but I wanted to save it. There may be some quality issues in this text, too. I hope to expand on this idea, with some images to help the understanding, in the near future.]

Most people don't seem to understand the true difference between Agile and traditional software development.

Waterfall is based on the idea that we take something we want to do, and break it down into subitems - actions or sub-components - and then deliver them separately - often by separate people who are experts in the activity or subdomain - and handing over those items to each other as needed. E.g. someone first needs to spec the requirements, then another person designs the UI, third person looks at architecture and technical design, before passing it to a fourth (UI programmer) and fifth persons (BE programmer) for coding. Then yet another person runs (often manual) tests on it and complains that it doesn't work. Yet more people might be involved in deployment, documentation, etc.

In this approach, it truly is difficult to break things down small enough.

Now, Scrum, being properly of Agile mindset, challenges this approach, by expecting people to complete items to a "potentially shippable" quality within each Sprint. "Coded but not tested" doesn't cut it, nor does "works on my machine". Each PBI is an independent capability that doesn't have to be returned to in the future, unless we specifically want to extend or modify that capability.

Enter "vertical slicing". Each slice contains all the activities needed to take an idea/need/desire from 0% to 100%. A little bit of spec, a little bit of architecture, a little bit of coding, a little bit of testing, a little bit of this and that, and at the end of the slice, that small things works in the product.

It can therefore be shown to someone, if we desire to hear feedback. Or it can be given for use if it's useful for some external purpose (not all vertical slices result in end-user valuable feature level). Or, we can simply see that we were able to make something work and we can inspect how well it works or how long it actually took us to do it.

When it comes to progress, there are only two points where we can objectively (well, with high enough confidence) know where we are - 0% and 100%. Anything in between is just guesswork. And people have made very elaborate guesswork tools and systems over the years. Big tools, great methods. But none of that has taken away the fundamental problem - it’s still just guesswork.

The problem with most guesswork is that it’s based only on what we know or can think of. The most significant risks are typically the ones that catch us by surprise. So while some amount of guessing is useful, going too far is sometimes even dangerous (but at least usually futile and waste of time). And trust me, I’ve done my share of those guessworks :). I used to love MS Project.

But, since we can only know 0% and 100%, we should focus on our attention to those numbers. 0% is easy - we haven’t done anything yet. But in waterfall, we start everything (with requirements) very early. We invest some into everything, then invest some more (planning), and invest even more (desing, then coding), before getting to the point where we can evaluate whether it all works or makes sense to our customers. So if we want to know as much of 0% as possible, we should not any work on most of the stuff.