An interesting thought on waterfall, agile and long term vision came up on the London Java Community mailing list.

Richard Gomes asked, quite rightly, if agile and lean reject long term planning and vision. People who know me will know that I don’t agree.

For me, the problem with waterfall is that we end up waiting far too long to see if our original vision or strategy was worth pursuing.

Agile is all about figuring out the smallest, quickest thing you can do to test a vision. And if the vision is right, then that thing should start to return some value to the business. If the vision was wrong, then it tells us that we need to change the vision.