Cute instead of rude — A re-created meme about Agile vs Waterfall

A comparative meme about agile vs waterfall became popular on social media recently. It criticised agile, stating that a team can only deliver worthless outcome even in an agile incremental way.

We recreated/adjusted the picture, and made it cute instead of rude. :) There are two major differences between agile and waterfall.

Timing

Please consider that Waterfall is also a proper way to deliver value in certain conditions (see the Cynefin framework by Snowden). If the environment is not changing rapidly and the requirements are clear, then waterfall development can result in ice cream as well, not necessarily a disaster. The main trap of WF is that the result is only visible in the very end when further changes and iteration is not an option anymore.

Iterative manner

In true agile, SOMETHING is delivered in every short iteration and it can be decided quickly whether it is valuable or not.

The Product Owner ensures that the product has a meaningful goal and in every iteration s/he experiments carefully and constantly incorporates valuable customer feedback to ensure that the released outcome is valuable. The entire Team shall seek jointly this imperative create value to the Customer in each Sprint.

Furthermore as Johnatan Hall pointed out, the Team is also responsible to clean up it’s mess after each iteration. Continuous improvement is inevitable to customer centric value creation in a timely manner for both product development and/or transformation.

#agile #scrum #memes #valuecreation