[Discuss] Agile software for a nacent project

[markw at mohawksoft.com (Mark Woodward)]

On 07/12/2012 09:52 PM, David Kramer wrote:
> Mark, we've had had this conversation before, and you have met me, so 
> I can safely say you're lying.

I want to add another note. There are a lot of companies in this 
industry and a number of them are genuinely good places to work. The 
majority of companies, however, this is not the case in my experience. 
You sound like a lucky person to not had worked at a horrible company.  
I have worked at some pretty damned bad companies. Sytron "Mandatory 
Weekends," BPS "Lay the developers off after they are finished their 
work." TPS "Bill by hour but pay salary, oh by the way, customer changes 
cost the customer, but don't affect the schedule and don't justify more 
people on the project." As well as a number of others. Aprigo where they 
tried three separate development projects with basically three different 
development teams  to accomplish a goal, and at the end of the last, 
which failed, they blamed all the engineers. (They LOVED Agile and it 
was their use of agile that pretty much colored my view of it.)

I'm not looking for a fight, but almost any development discipline in a 
well run company works because the company works. It is the "well run 
company" that gets the job done, not agile or water fall or cowboy. A 
poorly run company does not understand the development process will use 
the structure of agile in place of actually understanding the 
development process.

At least with waterfall, you get a design phase.