Waterfall is missing the part where the customer realizes they didn't actually want to go to Mars they just wanted to view it out of a telescope.

But now they can only travel to Mars and the telescope is out of the budget because you spent so much money on the rocket

Or the funders get bored of waiting after ten years of "no Mars yet" and cancel the project, leaving you with a half finished rocket.

2 years later: It's now up to the lawyers to figure out if it's the rocket that doesn't meet agreed requirements or if it's on the customer for not giving proper requirements.

Actual real world right now giant rockets include

• One that is being built under waterfall methodology. It has been being built for several years. That's the Blue Origin New Glen heavy lift reusable rocket

• One that is being developed under an agile methodology, it flew as a subscale lander to test their engine and flight control, it has flown four full test flights, improving on each. That's SpaceX's Starship

We are yet to see either launch a payload to orbit

All the projects that have shittier outcomes in my experience is always waterfall. This is mainly because the stakeholders usually have this bright idea to be added in the middle of development that's really need to be added at all costs and then got angry when the timeline got pushed because of their fucking request breaking a lot of shit.

At least scrum has a lead time of around 2 weeks so that when someone has a idea we can tell them we'll add it to the backlog and hope they forgot about it during the next sprint planning.

This is what I came to the comment section for.

If like me you're not a pro, it seems to literally just mean linear phases, so yeah, any nonlinearity would cause problems.

Also the strip stops midway through as Waterfall was an invented thing just for a paper. And during your UP work you actually had the customer put in that input and hence it was like in this cartoon strip.

Your comparison is interesting, but let's consider some historical facts. The Apollo program, which successfully put humans on the moon, actually employed many principles we now associate with Agile methodologies.

Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't a straightforward Waterfall process. NASA used frequent feedback (akin to daily Scrums), self-organizing teams, stable interfaces so that teams are an independent path to production, and iterative development cycles - core Agile practices. In fact, Mariana Mazzucato's book Mission Economy provides fascinating insights into how the moon landing project incorporated elements remarkably similar to modern Agile approaches. Furthermore, here's a NASA article detailing how Agile practices are used to send a rover to the moon: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160006387/downloads/20160006387.pdf?attachment=true

While it's true that building rockets isn't identical to software development, the underlying principles of flexibility, collaboration, and rapid iteration proved crucial to the missions' success. Programs like the Apollo program adapted constantly to new challenges, much like Agile teams do today.

Regarding Kanban and Scrum, you're right that they fall under the Agile umbrella. However, each offers unique tools that can be valuable in different contexts, even outside of software.

Perhaps instead of dismissing Agile outright for hardware projects, we could explore how its principles might be adapted to improve complex engineering endeavors. After all, if it helped us reach the moon and, decades later, send rovers to it, it might have more applications than we initially assume.

The author is also hyping up waterfall too much. Agile was created because waterfall has its shortcomings (e.g. the team realizes too late that what they’re building isn’t what the customer wants).

But I also think it also represents how poorly implemented these ideas are. People say they do agile/kanban/scrum, but in reality they do some freak version of these.

Going to the moon as a step towards going to Mars is so eminently correct that this comic should actually be Agile propaganda

PO: Someone else figure out how to repeat what he did.

Second developer: Sorry, I tried to make sense of his rocket design but I can't figure out how to make a copy that doesn't explode before we even put the fuel in.

This is the way.

That's called R&D, Research and Development. As long as you learn from a failure, it is progress towards success.

Getting to space. Fuck Musk, but SpaceX is doing great work.

An improvement.

I call that following the same successful recipe that got us the Falcon 9.

The mindset that considers those tests failures is the same one that would still be in bureaucracy hell determining what 40 year old technology we should repurpose to get a future over budget, late, and under performing solution designed and built.

This is the Kerbal methodology.