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Comment on Ask HN: What are up-to-date methods for software development?

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The current hotness is "Agile". A government contractor friend of mine cynically calls it "Waterfall but with 1 week, rather than 1 year, deadlines". Atlassian[0] has a good guide to generally understand what it is I think:

As far as tools, any of the big git providers (GitHub, Atlassian, GitLab) generally cover most of your bases. That kind of stuff is referred to as DevOps.

[0] - https://www.atlassian.com/agile

Government (and government contractor) Agile is Waterfall-but-faster. In fact, often "Agile" is only applied within the development phase and they retain everything else Waterfall. It often looks like this:

Design phase - waterfall-styled, 3-12 months

Development phase - "Agile", but with sprints planned out for the next 36-60 months

Test phase - waterfall-styled, 3-36 months

Deployment phase - waterfall-styled, 3-120 months

They don't incorporate testing properly during the Scrum-based development phase (only some testing, too limited to really provide confidence). They then use their experience to say, "Agile is bullshit". And they're right, if you take their definition of Agile which is: What we did before but with finer-grained "planning" of the work for 5 years.

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