Until I retired I worked for a software company that made (makes?) a product which has to work in a rapidly changing environment. Waterfall would never have worked. My problem was that the top management didn’t really understand the software development cycle and nor did some of the customers. They had trouble understanding that introducing new kit into their environment often required additional code due to a lack of standards for compliance. So some customers complained about too frequent updates and being asked to run diagnostics.
Top management therefore brought in an experienced guy in his early 60s to fix the problems. His solution? Demote the person who was responsible for the network part of the codebase, where the problems lay, and bring in a PhD from a military systems company - where waterfall rules. Nine months later as customer problems persisted, he introduced a design freeze and I decided to take early retirement.
So yes, I prefer the approach implied by scrum methods, I just object to the quasi-religion and the pseudo-Zen buzzwords. My feeling is that at the end of the day what is needed is for managements to take time to understand what their companies actually do, and work with the engineers on how best to facilitate it. No special sauce is needed.
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