UPDATE: Darrell Norton has provided a very in depth response to each of the concerns in his Agile conerns with responses post. Thanks Darrell!!
Darrell asked for some of the viewpoints from the skeptics so here's some of what was said yesterday from the Waterfall side of the “room“. Keep in mind this was meant to be a debate so being in between wasn't really allowed. As you can see it made for some interesting comments and concerns.
- Too disorganized
- How does the customer really make out any better?
- Won't it cost the customer more?
- How can we really control and manage changes in this environment? Won't we just be going back over and over to change what we've already done?
- Do you need to have Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) to be a fit with agile?
- It's too difficult to sell that type of process to clients.
- Our clients won't want to have that level of responsibility, they just want to hand us a document describing what they want and have us come back in 3 months with a finished “product”.
- Our clients our too busy with other things, they won't be able to give us the time and energy needed.
- So what happens to our QA staff?
- So if a client has the ability to end a project after an iteration how do we schedule resources and forcast revenues? Doesn't that add a lot of risk and uncertainty?
- Sounds too risky? Waterfall is much more conservative and stable, I like stability.
- Don't resources need to be able to do everything? Isn't it hard to find people like that?
- How do you know when your done?
- How do you handle changes in scope? I know its embraced but how do you actually manage all the changes?
- Customers will want more documentation.