Waterfall: Boeing/ULA does this. Their rockets cost $4B per launch, don't work, strand astronauts. Maybe the next repair/test cycle, if management's dumb enough to keep paying them.
Agile at least launches something.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Test-driven development: You spend all your time building a gizmo to tell you if you're on Mars or not. A week before the deadline you start frantically building a rocket.
These are all accurate, except the first Waterfall one, who also doesn't go to Mars.
Right. They design the whole rocket, spend years to build the rocket exactly according to the design doc, then the rocket explodes on the launchpad and they have to start all over.
That's why testing comes before launching.
The build phase took too much time, you now have 1 day to test all the features and design elements of the rocket, because launch day is tomorrow. Good luck!
So, we need waterfall testing to be separated?
Seems like the author has never programmed anything
I'm getting pretty old so I have experienced multiple waterfall projects. The comic should be
You want to go to mars You spend 3 months designing a rocket You spend 6 months building a rocket You spend a month testing the rocket and notice there is a critical desing flaw.
You start over again with a new design and work on it for 2 months You spend another 6 months building it You spend 2 months testing
Rocket works fine now, but multiple other companies already have been to Mars, so no need to even go anymore.
This is the perfect waterfall analogy.
I'm glad I'm not alone. I couldn't make sense of this comic.
pretty sure they're saying waterfall for building a rocket because that's literally how NASA builds a rocket, including the software. It's terrible for building anything other than a rocket though, because the stakes aren't high for most other projects, at least not in the way that a critical mistake will be incredibly bad.
i take you have never heard of the V-model. basically you climb the waterfall back up to verify everything. most things that fly within the atmosphere are done that way. pretty sure NASA would do the same.
You’re right I haven’t heard of that model, but NASA has documented pretty well that it follows waterfall. https://appel.nasa.gov/2018/11/27/spotlight-on-lessons-learned-aligning-system-development-models-with-insight-approaches/
You can assume people here know what waterfall and the V model are.
Depends. I've heard management talk about agile and waterfall, but I've not heard even one manager say V model.
A software engineer was not involved in this if waterfall is painted positively.
I think the last time I heard an engineer unironically advocating for a waterfall IRL was about a decade ago and they were the one of the crab-in-a-bucket, I-refuse-to-learn-anything-new types—with that being the very obvious motivation for their push-back.
And here I am, running projects for the past 20 years mostly using agile, and still very much unconvinced about its supposed superiority over waterfall.
Waterfall: Spend 10 years compiling written functional and technical requirements. Cancel the program due to budget overrun.
Yeah, waterfall would be "you collect requirements to build a rocket to Mars, 2 years later you have a rocket to Venus and it turns out they didn't think oxygen is essential, they'll have to add that in the next major release."
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What's not covered is the 25 years of R&D in advance of waterfall project starting, or that it's delivered 200% over time and cost due to those requirements being insufficient and based on assumptions that were never or are no longer true.
But at least the rocket has an opulent ball room as per the design spec
Waterfall only works if the programmer knows what the client needs. Usually it goes like:
- Client has a need
- Client describes what they think they need to a salesperson
- Salesperson describes to the product manager what an amazing deal they just made
- Product manager panics and tries to quickly specify the product they think sales just sold
- Developers write the program they think product manager is describing
- The program doesn’t think. It just does whatever buggy mess the programmer just wrote
- The client is disappointed, because the program doesn’t solve their needs
- Eventually Company decides "agile will fix things"
- Developers are told to work agile but the only stakeholder they talk to is the PO, who talks to PM, who talks to Sales, who talks to Customers
- PM&Sales don't want to deliver an unfinished/unpolished product so they give a review every sprint, by themselves, based on what they think the customer wants (they are Very Clever)
- A year or two later the project is delivered and the customer is predictably unhappy.
- Management says "how could this have happened!" and does it all over again.
as someone who has made it through multiple 'agile transformations' in large companies: that's how it usually goes.
however, that is the problem with people being stuck in their way and people afraid of loosing their jobs. PO is usually filled with the previous teamlead (lower management, maybe in charge of 20 ppl). PM & Sales have to start delivering unfinished Products! how else are you going to get customer feedback while you can still cheaply change things? A lot of the middle management has to take something they would perceive as a 'demotion' or find new jobs entirely - who would have guessed that with an entirely new model you cannot map each piece 1:1...
Given these and many more problems i have seen many weird things: circles within circles within circles, many tiny waterfalls... some purists would call SAFE a perversion of agile.
the point is: if you want to go agile, you have to change (who would have thought that slapping a different sticker won't do it?). the change has to start from the top. many companies try to do an 'agile experiment': the whole company is still doing what they do. however, one team does agile now - while still having to deliver in and for the old system...
I've seen so many companies force Agile without changing the management layer and style. Setting deadlines while demanding that teams work Agile. Insanity!
That’s what we use in my company: a series of mini waterfalls
In terms of Mars
- Client wants a robot to go to Mars
- Project is budgeted and sold to send a Mars Rover
- Work starts and after successful test the robot is shown to customer. Customer states he wants to send a Mechwarriors in a drop ship, not a little Pathfinder.
- Panic, change requests, money being discussed, rockets are being strapped together with duct tape and the rover is bolted on an old Asimo that is being rebuilt into the smallest Mechwarrior ever the day before launch
- Mech Asimo lands successfully, stumbles and falls on a rock after three steps
- Customer disappointed
They forgot the bit where the Waterfall method blew through the budget and deadline about five times over.
And it turns out the customer actually needed a blender
This is why I always act as if neither exists
Yeah, but waterfall requires that management knows what they want. It's impossible!
This but unironically
I don't think that they were being ironic....
So often it's patience from stakeholders to allow for time to actually design and build the things, or willingness to admit the actual cost, or an impossible grand vision with an unqualified/understaffed team, and of course reprioritizing constantly as if it's easy to resume later without paying ramp up.
Don't get me started on the constant detailed status reports...
Yeah, it requires replacing the "you test the rocket" with "you test the rocket and it fails or doesn't meet the updated mission specifications" and the "you go to mars" with "you want to go to mars"
Scrum is about transparency, not intransparency for a month
Scrum is not about any of the things that Scrum proponents claim it's about.
Specifically, it's not about agility, it's not about velocity, it's not about quality, it's not about including the "customer", and it's only about a kind of transparency that has absolutely no impact on the final product.
But yeah, it's about some kind of transparency.
Specifically, you would have to put in effort to be more wrong.
Go read the scrum manifest.
In reality, companies always adapt for what they think suits them. Very rarely do you actually use scrum completely as intended, that's fine. But you don't blame the cow when the cook burned your steak. You blame the cook.
Oh yes, everyone know that waterfall works and the rest sucks, nice
A good team can make any of these strategies work. A bad team will make a mockery out of them all. Most teams are neither good or bad, and stumble forward, or backwards, doing the motions
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The Agile Development here is the same result I’ve experienced for every one of these methods. Mostly because of clients/management.
That's why agile was created. Because people don't know what they want in panel 1.
More accurately the waterfall mission ends up on Phobos only to have to scramble to figure out how to land on Titan because the customer can't tell the difference between moons
Kiiiinda true but only with boomer-era on-disk printed at a factory Waterfall. Also everything after agile is just copium for an over professionalized world in which craftsmanship itself had given way, undermining the very concept of expertise so everything is junior devs and now ai
Seems biased... What's that logo they're trying to hide in the top-right?
Must be OP trying to hide it, Toggl displayed it proudly. The author used to work for Toggl marketing and ask can be seen from this post, did an excellent job. He still has a webcomic, it's just not marketing for Toggl anymore. Here it is
As for bias - it's a time tracking tool, but I don't think they actually shill for waterfall, I think it's just poking fun at the agile methodologies.
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