Member-only story
Good CRAGILE: Crappy Agile That Works!
What an Old Waterfall Guy Learned in the Land of SCRUM
I like to think I’ve always had a kind of pragmatic approach to building things, one that skips rules that are impeding progress when necessary. But I had spent years working in big hardware and software teams, and it had taught me to expect there to be a pretty rigid, waterfall-style development flow.
Eventually though our management decided to move our development team to an Agile process, and found myself sitting in an Agile training meeting, arms crossed, listening to heretical talk about how we didn’t need to plan things out six months in advance, and could just do it in two-week “sprints.” No weeks writing detailed specs, no spec review phase before development starts. Insanity!
At my first job at Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1980s, I worked in a mainframe development group. Spec reviews were sometimes held between the hardware team, and the VMS team that was writing the operating system support for the new machine. These reviews were attended by dozens of people from each team and took a full week. They were held at hotel event rooms and featured fully catered lunches, and the VMS participants had to drive almost an hour to get there to attend.