I can understand and even support ad blocking for two reasons, Avoiding wasting data (particularly on annoying video ads) and Protecting Privacy (not sure why every site that I visit seems to need to contact Facebook, particularly since I'm not a Facebook member and never will be. The HOSTS file seems to be a big help with this on my desktop, but I don't seem to have access to one on my non-rooted Android devices.

So, with one of the concerns being Privacy, why in hell does the Adblock site say: "Join the Adblock Browser Beta Google+ community here (make sure you’re looged into G+ first!)" before letting me download????? I have no use for Google+ or any other failed attempt by Google to play social media games, or any other social media product (see the thoughts on Facebook above). Why the hell does a software app that pretends to promote the individual's right to opt-out of things demand that I be part of Google+ before I can download it????? Not going to happen and I've lost all faith in them.

Global collaboration is a huge challenge that has not really been solved. Or, more accurately the solutions are still not as good as being in person. But, presumably some one made the cost benefit decision that the advantages of being global make up for the disadvantages. (skeptical undertones intended)

From a classroom perspective and any situation where you can get a bunch of people together to solve hard problems, vast amounts of whiteboard space are a highly effective tool. The problem is after spending a bunch of time going down bunny trails, back tracking, etc... which the white board is really good for, the final result needs to be put into a form that can be made persistent in some way. For something short term that will be used immediately, a photo might be good enough to refresh memories, when necessary. For something to be kept longer some one gets the thankless task of transcribing the results. Although, I thank that person profusely for doing something incredibly important but tedious.

Sure, let's solve this problem by ... uh .. what, legislating HTML practices? Brilliant.

I don't think you understand games a service.

It helps if you know what you're talking about. Starcraft you can mod all you want in single player, in fact, they effectively encourage Starcraft mods.

They still have 7M subscribers. I'd hardly count that as dead.

Cats only eat a relatively small % of the birds they kill. I'm a cat owner, but the numbers don't lie.

Their crowdfunding goal has been far surpassed (more than $476,000 at this writing), but more can't hurt

With no clue what they would do with more, and the goal met more than twice over, I'm not inclined to contribute and not even sure that more will not hurt. I certainly don't want them giving the excess to NASA as was suggested, I can easily see politicians making proportional reductions in the NASA budget for every dollar given and spending that money on liberal social projects. Or the Planetary Society might decide that they have done such a good job in raising funds that their officers deserve a bigger pay check or a big party or other perks.

It strikes me as fairly obvious that this at least had the potential to greatly exceed its goal, and the honest and responsible thing to do would have been to spell out additional goals or what would be done with any excess funds. I don't think the Planetary Society deserves a big slush fund for failing to do that.

Well, that is the Taylor versus Deming argument. Very loosely summarized as: People are the problem versus people are the solution. That is more fundamental than Waterfall versus Agile. It seems like it is what drives people to one process or the other.

It has not been my experience that you start with developers writing lots of code before understanding the project. You have to fill the backlog before doing anything. That means prioritizing backlog items which means knowing enough about those items to gain some prioritization. Although one trap is de-prioritizing really valuable things that you don't are risky rather than doing the opposite which it prioritize efforts to resolve that risk in some way. The shorter the sprints means the smaller the backlog item needs to be to fit in a sprint which means a fairly high degree of understanding of requirement and design in order to split stories small enough. The only significant difference with respect to waterfall then is that the best splitting and understanding of requirements and design is on near term items and later items are more vague.

I can write a whole bunch of other stuff because there are consequences to every choice and those consequences are handled using different techniques. And, on top of the general consequences, every organization is a complex system with many hidden and visible feedback loop and both waterfall and agile interact with that system good, bad, and sideways. Change from one to the other and all of those feedback loops kick in and new ones are created and the whole system can react in unexpected ways. This is nothing new, Six Sigma, TQM, Lean, and others I have never heard of get brought into organizations and perturb the system in unexpected ways.

Well, the systems engineer creates great requirements that exactly match the customer's needs at that time and then just as development starts the business environment changes and those requirements are no longer valid. If you are following the do ALL the requirements, followed by ALL the design, followed by ALL the development, etc... What has happened is you have detailed requirements and design and done a ton of work that created zero value to anyone. Presuming you make the rational decision to abandon the no longer relevant requirements. Should you push through and develop software to those requirements it probably creates even more waste.

The thing is Waterfall versus Agile is not really the argument. We are just rehashing the Taylor (Scientific Management) versus Deming (Lean) argument. The thought experiment I do is to think of a Lean organization that is currently doing waterfall. Applying Lean to the waterfall process over the course of much continuous improvement starts to look like agile+continuous delivery.

Consider the wastes of Work in Progress (WIP) and Handoffs. The first thing one would notice is that the requirements phase creates a big queue of Work in Progress (WIP) in the form of unimplemented requirements for the Design phase which creates a queue of unimplemented designs for development and so on... Queues kill cycle time and WIP is waste. So, you put in WIP limits which means less work to complete which creates faster cycles that start to look a lot like sprints. That will tend to expose the waste of hand off because the overhead of hand off gets exposed by the higher cycle time. So, you pull your Analysts, Product Owners/Customers, developers, testers closer together to reduce the handoffs between them which at its ultimate conclusion starts to look like an Agile team. I could keep going, but I think that describes the idea.

There are a variety of other ways to look at the differences. There is the people are the problem and more process and control is the solution to problems (Taylorist) versus people are the solution and making the people better is the solution. (Deming)

If you are in a Taylorist organization with no desire to change I would not attempt Agile. But, there are lots of good software development practices that have the Agile sheen on them that work in any framework.

I would not concede this point:
"Now, on waterfall: of course it is more solid and efficient than agile..."

I would say that waterfall is more inefficient than agile and that inefficiency hides organizational dysfunctions.

Well, I would not consider hiding dysfunction a good thing. Successful waterfall tends to meet the schedule and budget and fail at providing what the customer actually wanted because customers generally don't know or can't describe what they really want until the see it.

But, setting that aside. Waterfall is fragile to change. Agile is resilient to change but will expose a lack of discipline in other areas. But, there are two fundamentals that change that fragility to resilience. The first is that short iterations exposes problems quickly. Second, that continuous improvement is embraced to correct the top problems exposed every iteration. So, "fail fast" and correct the problem. Pretty much every other practice involves ways to fail faster or correct typical failures. And, some may not work within your organization, if it doesn't you find out quickly and try something else.

This is a huge weakness of the waterfall process. It typically takes a long time to get through the whole process 6 months to years. So, you can't tell if you got the requirements phase right until quite a long time after going through that phase and you don't get to correct it until the next project and assuming there is a correction it is often more process for the sake of process.

In an Agile iteration you cycle through a significant chunk of the process, and try to do a production deployment of something in as few iterations as possible to expose all the problems. And, especially when switching an existing application development to an Agile process, you are not going to get everything into the iteration all at once. Make sure you are honest and accept that you don't have fully automated end to end integration test, yet and set aside an iteration to do that and correct any problems before deploying.

I will tell you a little secret. Every time my group has made a significant change towards being more "Agile" we have generally had some fairly significant problems in the first sprint. What some might even call a failed sprint. But, we take our hits and figure out what needs to be fixed and the second sprint is generally successful, and 3 and 4 are better and better.

One could argue that waterfall is good at the extremes. Perfect organizations where everything it locked down which makes the process work, and horrible organizations where the process rigidity provides the discipline that would not otherwise exist. Agile works better in that space in the middle where people are generally good and trying to do the right thing, and you just need a framework for discovery. Whether that discovery is of the customer's real needs or internal development problems or whatever...

Or, as I put is in a longer post. Agile practice have a tendency to expose all of the dysfunctions and waste. The analogy is that a deep slow moving river hides even the big rocks. Agile lowers the water level and starts exposing all the rocks, and the point of having short iterations and retrospectives is to recognize the rocks and remove them. Summarized as "Go slower to go faster." But, management decides not to invest in removing the rocks because the software has to be done on schedule, but reality is all the bombs that are going to cause the schedule to be missed are left behind.

That is exactly what happens. And, some of the leaders in the field have realized that a lot of what is called Agile (Poppendiek, Larman, Vodde, Leffingwell) are essentially implementations of Lean Product Development from Toyota to Software Development. What often happens is that, like Lean in manufacturing, organizations take up some of the forms of Lean/Agile while completely missing the fundamentals and the culture. That is key. If you don't realize that Agile or Lean are an organizational culture change not a set of practices that are a silver bullet what you end up doing is slapping Lean or Agile onto a dysfunctional culture. And, one of the things that many Agile practices will expose very quickly is all of the dysfunctions and waste built into an organization.

Consider the poster who complained about QA/QC being ignored. What was happening in waterfall was the exact same thing, but the long QA/QC cycle was hiding the fact that the developers were producing crap. Actually, calling it QA/QC was a misnomer, it was actually finish all the stuff we half-assed during the development phase. Oh and what management thought they would get from Agile was that they could knock out QA/QC and get the same work done in the same time that would have been allocated for the development phase in waterfall. So, the same schedule pressures that forced developers to take short cuts in waterfall never went away, and the result is that the same shortcuts happened without the QA/QC phase to fix them. And, was there a retrospective or root cause analysis or empowerment of individuals to pull the stop cord on the train to correct these issues that were exposed. Of course not because if you stop you will miss the schedule and that cannot happen, etc.. etc... Slapping Agile practices onto a dysfunctional organization does not fix the dysfunction. Culture changes take years, especially in larger organizations when there is not the top to bottom commitment to changing the entire organization.

There is also the problem of "flexible" translating to "without discipline". My experience is that Agile and Lean requires a level of discipline far beyond typical waterfall. The waterfall processes often require the facade of discipline, but rarely actual discipline especially at the individual level. And, when discipline is attempted on individuals it usually has more to do with imposing additional process and reporting that does not contribute to actually delivering results. Which is exactly the same thing another poster complains about where Agile gets used to micro-manage daily tasks. Which is another example of missing the point, daily tasks and a daily meeting is to free PMs and Managers from micro-managing holding each person accountable for accomplishing something each day. I call it peer pressure accountability because other than sociopaths most people don't want to be the guy who tells their team mates that they did not do what they said they would do yesterday, or did some ridiculously trivial task while some one else did something significant.

In some cases Agile shouldn't be used, but those are generally caused by external forces like being in an inflexible contract situation. In that case, I advise the philosophy of "Don't lie to yourself." Instead understand your constraints and realize a lot of the practices used by Agile and Lean organizations are almost universally beneficial. Automated testing and continuous integration are a good idea regardless. Splitting work into small chunks and working on a cadence (takt time) can be beneficial locally even though globally you are still producing tons of WIP. And, so on and so forth...