I have been in my new job for over a month now, and I a better grasp of the development methodologies. Obviously, I keep comparing the methods to how we did at my old job, since the differences are quite explicit. Whereas before I was submerged in a SCRUM world, I am now working in a team that applies a waterfall model for development.
In all honesty, the beginnings were a little difficult to getting used to. For many years I have been moving at break neck speed with a release every two to three weeks. On top of that there were the ever present bug fixes and panic solutions that characterize that particular organization. This is not meant as a negative critique of anything or anybody since I thoroughly enjoyed most of it. However, the stark contrast between the two methods does merit a comment.
The waterfall approach is without a doubt more cumbersome than the agile approach – that goes without saying. However, I am starting to appreciate the actual analytics that go before actual coding starts. Unlike before, it seems that there is time to identify problems and intricacies a priori as opposed to dealing with them a posteriori. I am pretty excited to see if this actually makes a difference when we start the coding, but I have high hopes that the development phase will be a lot more controlled than what we were able to do when I was apart of an agile team.
One could argue that the comparison in this is invalid, since the agile team made commercial software, and the waterfall team makes software for internal use, which basically changes the premises for the whole reason for developing a piece of software. However, I believe it is pretty valuable to experience both sides of the fence in order to ascertain which parts are useful, and which parts are not.