Bulldozer00's Blog

I was going through some old project stuff and stumbled upon the chart below. I developed it back when I was the software lead of a nine person sub-team on an embedded system product development effort:

Putting all those indecipherable acronyms adorning the chart aside, note that the project was performed in 2004 – a mere 3 years after the famous “Agile Manifesto” was hatched. I can’t remember if I knew about (or read) the manifesto at the time, but I do know that Tom Gilb’s “Evo“ and Barry Boehm’s “Spiral“ processes had radically changed my worldview of software development. Specifically, the (now-obvious) concept of incremental development and delivery rang my bell as the best way to mitigate risk on challenging, software-intensive, projects.

As the chart illustrates, the actual hand-off of each of the seven builds (to the system integration test team) was pretty much dead nuts right on target. Despite the fact that the project front end (requirements definition and software design) was managed as a “waterfall” endeavor, the targets were met. Thus, I’m led to believe the following trivial trivia:

Not all agile projects succeed and not all waterfall projects fail.