Most of the people you describe here will try to start changes at the last possible second, and since our estimates are always wrong, and preemptions always happen, then they start all changes too late to avoid the consequences of waiting too long. It is the worst of all worlds. Because the solution and the remidiatiom are both rushed, leading to tech debt piling up instead of being paid down.
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. But waterfall is not just a battle plan, it’s an entire campaign. And the problem comes both from trying to define problems we have little in house experience with, and then the sunk cost fallacy of having to redo all that “work” of project definition when reality and the customers end up not working the way we planned.
And BTW, trying to maintain the illusion of that plan results in many abstractions leaking. It creates impedance mismatches in the code and those always end up multiplying the difficulty of implementing new features. This is a major source of Business and Product not understanding why implementing a feature is so hard. It seems like it should just fit in with the existing features, but those features are all a house of cards built on an abstraction that is an outright fabrication.
Most of the people you describe here will try to start changes at the last possible second, and since our estimates are always wrong, and preemptions always happen, then they start all changes too late to avoid the consequences of waiting too long. It is the worst of all worlds. Because the solution and the remidiatiom are both rushed, leading to tech debt piling up instead of being paid down.
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. But waterfall is not just a battle plan, it’s an entire campaign. And the problem comes both from trying to define problems we have little in house experience with, and then the sunk cost fallacy of having to redo all that “work” of project definition when reality and the customers end up not working the way we planned.
And BTW, trying to maintain the illusion of that plan results in many abstractions leaking. It creates impedance mismatches in the code and those always end up multiplying the difficulty of implementing new features. This is a major source of Business and Product not understanding why implementing a feature is so hard. It seems like it should just fit in with the existing features, but those features are all a house of cards built on an abstraction that is an outright fabrication.