We've invented waterfall

The long and the short of it for me is this: There's two ways to solve problems. Agile helps immensely when you are figuring out how the solution would work. When you're solving a problem that might be solved in manual processes largely, Waterfall can help a lot, but not alone.

For unknown solutions, agile gives you a lot of iterative benefits.

For known solutions, waterfall with some agile feedback loops gives you incremental benefits.

What's the difference?

Sometimes, in a business, they have a great process already. It's in paper, or multiple systems, but they have their way of doing things that works. I believe it's called their competitive advantage.

Othertimes, a business is facing a problem for the first time, and wonder "how do we solve this". In this case, doing a big upfront design is a waste of time, starting small and staying flexible is most important.

For me, this mindset of doing both is critical, not one or the other at all times. You simply miss out on too much if you don't use agile, and you run around too much if you ignore waterfall when a solution exists.

Waterfall works where it's a known process, like building a house. You can have agile loops in there when building a house and improve it as you go.

When you're trying to build a new building that's never been built before, an iterative, feedback-centric approach like Agile is a lot more beneficial.

If a company focuses on taking something like Waterfall and introducing feedback loops (agile) like this epicenter thing, is it not a bit clearer than the black-box voodoo out there? Maybe it's just me, but I applaud anyone trying to make software easier. It just shouldn't be a dogmatic, or religious dismissal.

0.02.

But thats the thing. You should count politics as part of your requirements too, or thats what the theory states anyway.

For example, lets say you digitized an inventory form for a sales dept of a plastic company. By doing this, you effectively removed use of a pen from the 'system'. Now what politics could you possibly be affecting by eliminating use of a pen? Well, you could cause an uproar between the finance dept and the sales dept. Finance says that the organization's major stock holder is a pen company and the sales department must use pens (for whatever reason...lets pick advertising and promotion).

Now your system made the world efficient but it failed to account the current work practices of your client. You, sir, just screwed up.

Yeah yeah yeah...but I did come bearing gifts!