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View the original Read/WriteWeb post by Alex Iskold (”The Future of Software Development”).

In the real Web world, software projects stories have ill-defined and constantly evolving requirements, making it impossible to think everything through at once. Instead, the best software Web story today is created and evolved using agile methods. These techniques allow engineers journalists to continuously re-align software stories with business and customer needs.

The Waterfall Model of software development storytelling, coined in1970, will not work in such a world. Its idea was to construct systems tell stories by first reporting gathering requirements, then creating the story doing the design, then implementing editing it, then testing creating and editing it again, and finally publishing it getting it out the door in one linear sequence.

The Waterfall Model is now considered a flawed method for Web stories because it is so rigid and unrealistic.

Non-technical storytelling people tend to think that software stories are is soft or easily changeable.
Nope. Software Stories, like any mechanical system, have a design and structure; they are not as soft as they seem.

Yet the accelerating pace of business requires constant changes to software storytelling. Using the Waterfall Model, these changes were impossible, the development cycle was too long, systems stories were over produced engineered and ended up costing a fortune, and often did not work right.

The second A problem with the Waterfall Model was that in nature the information jungle, dynamic systems stories are not engineered told once; they evolve over time in bits and pieces.

Software development Storytelling neededs a major rethinking. First, software stories have to embrace change. Today’s assumptions and requirements may change tomorrow, and software stories need to respond to changes quickly.

Agile software development storytelling

The software systems stories created using agile methods are much more successful because they are evolved and adapted to the problem Web customers. Like living organisms, these systems stories are continuously reshaped to fit the dynamic Web landscape of changing requirements customer attention.