Hey guys I’m trying to come up with the perfect concise way of explaining what agile methodology is when explaining it to my friends. Every time I do, I feel like I ramble on and on and what it’s principles and values are without actually understanding what they are. My manager also says this too.
In: Technology
Waterfall:
Customer says they want a car with 4 wheels and 2 doors. You build them a car with that, it takes 1 year. They hate it. Turns out they wanted it in red and to have 4 doors – even though they said 2 originally.
Agile:
Customer says they want car with 2 doors and 4 wheels. You do 4 weeks of work, then show them the progress. They say “yes keep going” or “no actually let me see the design in red”. Rinse and repeat. Now it takes 2 years instead of 1 because of all the damn meetings but they actually got what they wanted (since honestly they don’t know what they want yet) and you did work in more bite-sized tasks.
Agile is great for designing what someone *actually wants* or needs, especially if the environment is changing a lot. Maybe 2 door cars become really popular next year and you need to adapt. Agile is less popular when you do something that requires VERY strict upfront designs and guidelines to sing off on, like building a bridge.
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