Reading this thread is bumming me out because it's made me realized my company USED TO have a good fusion between 'waterfall' and 'agile'. The requirements development phase, development, and testing phases were all very flexible and had feedback mechanisms as we gradually figured out The Right Way to get the thing to work.
Systems, software, and testing all worked in close concert so that software developers could find problems or gaps in requirements, as could testers. And of course there was a strong feedback loop between software & test. Meetings were weekly and people reached out to each other as needed outside of that. A daily standup was usually a sign that something was wrong.
In recent years we've moved to cargo-cult capital-A Agile, so we've basically traded our flexible process for a LOT more meeting overhead and pretty much a negative gain in efficiency. We spend significant portions of meetings talking about process which was never a problem in the past.
All because we didn't fit some predefined one-size-fits-all framework... sad!
(and of course the REALLY dumb thing, is that we're still often tied to a delivery schedule of 1 or 2 builds a year, with customer selloff testing - so the external process we fit into is still 'waterfall-y')
e; I guess one thing I neglected to mention here is schedule. We usually never had issues with schedule, our timelines were generous enough that even if we underestimated the complexity of something we could still make the delivery date. (admittedly there would sometimes be crunch periods in the last few weeks before delivery)
Systems, software, and testing all worked in close concert so that software developers could find problems or gaps in requirements, as could testers. And of course there was a strong feedback loop between software & test. Meetings were weekly and people reached out to each other as needed outside of that. A daily standup was usually a sign that something was wrong.
In recent years we've moved to cargo-cult capital-A Agile, so we've basically traded our flexible process for a LOT more meeting overhead and pretty much a negative gain in efficiency. We spend significant portions of meetings talking about process which was never a problem in the past.
All because we didn't fit some predefined one-size-fits-all framework... sad!
(and of course the REALLY dumb thing, is that we're still often tied to a delivery schedule of 1 or 2 builds a year, with customer selloff testing - so the external process we fit into is still 'waterfall-y')
e; I guess one thing I neglected to mention here is schedule. We usually never had issues with schedule, our timelines were generous enough that even if we underestimated the complexity of something we could still make the delivery date. (admittedly there would sometimes be crunch periods in the last few weeks before delivery)