Danny Radcliffe (not who you're thinking of), team manager on the frontend team at Rainbow Wing Solutions Ltd, returned from a week long conference and is excitedly moving the team to a new agile methodology they call Planned Features.
"I saw a great session that showed the benefits of front-loading all project planning to the start of a project. After all requirements are agreed upon and signed-off, the code can be written. I think they called it waterflow, or waterfa...eh, something like that. We'll call it 'Planned Features' because it rolls off the tongue easier. Besides, we can call it whatever we want because we'll modify it to fit our needs. For example, in the waterflow process they talked about, you're supposed to have a preliminary analysis phase, but I think we'll skip that to be even more agile."
The developers on the team are much less open to the idea. "I've never heard of a company planning projects this way. But as long as no one changes their mind after the planning phase, I guess it'll work out," said the junior developer on the team.
A senior developer is against the idea. "It not agile. Like, at all. What happens if we get half-way through a project and realize something won't work as well as we thought it would. We'd have to go back to the planning phase, extend the coding phase, and it'll eat into QA time. This all seems oddly familiar, and bad."
Even with all the negative feedback Radcliffe has received from the team, he is beyond confident this will be successful. If it works on this team, the Planned Features methodology will roll out to everyone else in the company and Radcliffe will probably get a promotion. If it doesn't work, the company will lose a ton of money.