Agile as Trauma

I want you to consider instead the possibility that Waterfall came to exist, and continues to exist, for the convenience of managers: those who need you to promise them something specific, and then deliver exactly what you promised them, when you promised you’d deliver it.

Fixed time, variable scope.

In particular, not all software is a Web app ... We discount the volume of, for instance, embedded systems and one-off infrastructure.

Your team dynamic is something you can always affect, even if you have no meaningful influence over the major strategic decisions of an organization.

Users constitute an essential source of information, up to and including their interactions with prototypes and as paying customers.

There are idiosyncrasies of software development that are invariant even as technique and technology improves, and so you are bound to recapitulate these patterns eventually.

Basic structures cannot be composed into larger structures unless they themselves are internally consistent, and so the creation of software, just like any artifact of language, is naturally incremental.Software is a very verbose, very precise incantation of how an information system ought to behave.

Cross-functional teams: people can work on different parts of a system in parallel.

Conceptual integrity makes the product both easier to develop and easier to use, because this integrity is communicated to both the development team and the user, through the product.