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Comment by Pamar | Hacker News Reader

I have a question: can someone describe something akin to what we call “methodology” in a completely different field?

Does “scrum for surgery” exist? What is an equivalent of “waterfall” in warfare?

Does something like this exist at all?

Not really, although in the book "The Checklist Manifesto", Atul Gawande reports that having something akin to a "stand up meeting" before a surgery has been shown to reduce the likelihood of errors occurring during that surgery. And that brings us around to "agile" methodologies. I feel like most people agree that the underlying value system outlined in the agile manifesto made sense, and that many of the practices outlined can be useful, but at some point (scrum, maybe?) a particular set of practices got bundled up and sold as The One True Way of Doing Things, and then sanity went out the window. For example, test-driven development can be a useful tool for thinking about how to approach a problem, but of course it isn't the only way to write a program (see Ron Jeffries hilarious attempt to TDD a sudoku solver as a counterexample). But sadly, many teams aren't in a position to think critically about what they do or don't do - instead, they have to show that they're "doing Agile".

I am aware of Kanban’s origin and also of the checklist manifesto. My question wanted to stimulate pondering/debating about what a “methodology” is supposed to be and what, exactly, is trying to accomplish. A lot of the comments seem to say that “above average developers will always find the most productive way to self-organizing.

Letting apart the problem in always finding “above average people” - at least for now - I think that this has a fatal flaw: what happens when someone leaves and/or someone else joins the group?

I suppose that Hospitals and the Army have this happening fairly often, they must have “methodologies” catering for a wide spectrum of talents, and also accomplish satisfactorily results even when dealing with thorny, unexpected problems.

What do they use? Is this a “methodology”? (One important thing that I am not sure is adequately represented in IT methodologies is having an established vocabulary to describe situations: we have “Patterns” but these are low-level, and divorced by the actual business-specific scenario - this is just one example but I think it helps pointing out that IT methodologies are trying to standardize the wrong elements).

Not a perfect analog, but how about mise en place in the cooking world?

Also famously, Kanban originated at Toyota for manufacturing.

Prince2 for project management.

waterfall is not specific to and was not invented for software development.

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