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Comment by zb | Hacker News Reader

Because the customer has no freaking idea what the requirements are at the start of the project. That's always been the failure of Waterfall. You've never been writing code and suddenly thought of something that needed to be added to (or removed from) the system? Seriously?

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I'm not sure how what you said is incompatible with waterfall/spiral. You can certainly add/remove/change requirements, but you don't start coding until you have at least a first pass on some subset of requirements.

Waterfall doesn't have multiple passes. You have to have all your requirements before you move on to design. And that has to be complete before you move on to implementation. That's why they use the waterfall metaphor, because waterfalls don't flow back up. And if waterfall seems completely braindead now, keep in mind that the old software guys used to be hardware guys, and it makes much more sense for hardware.

You're right about Spiral though... Spiral is iterative, so its much more compatible.

Waterfall doesn't have multiple passes

the only way that it can not have multiple passes is if the program is thrown away after V1.0. Any successfully program will be maintained and extended.

Because the customer has no freaking idea what the requirements are at the start of the project.

I disagree. to get a scrum project (or any project) going, you do need to have a vague idea of what you want (e.g. I want a website to sell my widgets online) and a few features for the next iteration (.e.g. List all the widgets. Take an order by email).

Scrum just says that you can inspect, adapt and iterate over that process.

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