A little bit of Waterfall

Agile, what have you done! I used to believe in you.

There I was, happily finishing iteration N of my online board game library, unaware of the terrible event which would shatter iteration N+1. While thinking about which features I would like to add next, I stumbled upon a major feature for which I was not ready yet, and probably never will! Not with this codebase, anyway.

This was a board game library. I was working on a board game library because recently, I have been playing a lot of digital board games on my iOS devices. I was mostly playing them in the subway. So, it would make sense to assume that a major use case for my online board game library would be for a group of friends to play together in the subway, or on the train, while waiting to get to their destination.


The problem is, there is no internet in the subway.

My codebase was an HTTP server written in Haskell, so I pretty much had to scrap the project and start anew. I'm trying node.js this time, this should allow me to use the same game logic on the server (for distributed games), as on the browser (for local games).

The point of this post is not that node.js is better; I don't know that yet. The point of this post is that if I had done a bit more planning at the beginning of the project, the "also works offline" requirement would have jumped at me as being the serious technology-limiting, can't-do-it-in-Haskell-then factor that it is. I didn't spot it early because I didn't plan that far ahead: being a good Agile developer, I only planned the features I could complete within the first iteration.


Clearly, I am not going to ditch Agile on the first offence, but next time, before I even begin iteration 1, I am certainly going to spend some time collecting requirements. And throwing them in the garbage. After all, the details are clearly going to change midway during the project, that's why we use many iterations. But by looking at a large enough sample of example requirements, I should be able to pick a more appropriate technology next time.


That is, next time, I will put a bit of Waterfall in my Agile wine.