I love jazz, because it’s different every time, even when the same people are playing the same song – and I find Classical music mostly rather dull because you’re reading music from a score, so, barring subtle differences of conductors’ interpretations, it’s the same every time, and there’s not much scope for individual expression. Not compared to jazz anyway!
(though a quick shout out for the mathematical beauty of Bach and the amazing melodramatic melancholy of Mahler’s slow movements).
Which got me to thinking about Agile vs Waterfall. With Agile you make it up as you go along, like jazz, while with Waterfall you have a whole detailed choreographed plan of who-will-do-what before you start, and then it all goes exactly to plan from the start. Perhaps a bit boring, but you get what you contracted for. While with Agile/Jazz it’s not necessarily optimised, the solos might not be as good as they were last time, and you might not like what you get. But you might love it. And the people playing it have a great time!
Does that mean that Agile is better? For music maybe, but for projects maybe not. If it’s possible to plan a symphony it is surely possible to plan a project with lots of people and tasks to be done in the right order. And if you need to finish on time, or there are certain things you MUST cover, then surely it’s worth having a score.
And actually waterfall is not completely unlike jazz, because in jazz you usually have a structure – play the melody, then a sax solo, piano solo, and there might be either a bass or drum solo (which you decide before you start), and of course you have known chords throughout so the sax solo is played on top of a base of known structure – and then you improvise within that structure. Waterfall is similar, in that you have an overall plan, usually shown and agreed with everyone at the start as a Gantt chart, and then you do improvise within that. You are doing creative work and solving little problems all through the project, but you keep to the overall plan – and that’s jazz. Agile, where you have literally NO overall plan, just (sometimes) a finish date, is like Free Jazz where anyone can play anything, and where you often get a terrible cacophony as the result.
So….. maybe waterfall is enough like jazz to be the winner….?
