Professional Challenge- Attend IT/IS Professional Meeting

The first meeting I attended was on February 4^th with the Phoenix Scrum Users Group.  The presenter, Larry Apke, is a Scrum Master, agile coach, consultant, and software development manager who has many years of experience in the IT field.   The topic of his discussion was Complexity Theory and why Waterfall Development works (sometimes). 

Larry began his presentation with some background on Waterfall Development and where it originated from.  Winston Royce presented this development methodology in a paper in 1970 but was it misunderstood.  Royce said that this strategy was “risky and invited failure.”  However, it was soon adopted by government agencies and became the new standard process for software development in organizations all over.  Larry used the Cynefin Model to help describe why Waterfall doesn’t work most of the time.  One of the things this model describes is the difference between things that are complex and those that are complicated.  Larry proposed that most software development projects are complex but get approached as if they are complicated and that’s why so many of them fail.  Agile methodology should be used as the default rather than waterfall.