“I’ve been saving for months to get the Corsair Dominator 64GB CL30 kit,” one beleagured PC builder wrote on Reddit. “It was about $280 when I looked,” said u/RaidriarT, “Fast forward today on PCPartPicker, they want $547 for the same kit? A nearly 100% increase in a couple months?”
I think you’re confusing doing analysis before coding with doing all analysis before coding.
If you do Agile properly (so including Use Cases with user prioritization and User feedback - so the whole system, not just doing the fashionable bits like stand up meetings and then claiming “we do Agile development”) you do analysis before development as part of evaluating how long it will take to implement the requirements contained in each Use Case. In fact this part of Agile actually pushes people to properly think through the problem - i.e. do the fucking analysis - before they start coding, just in bit-sized easy to endure blocks.
Further, in determining which Use Cases depend on which Use Cases you’re doing a form of overall, system-level analysis.
Also you definitelly need some level of overall upfront analysis no matter what: have a go at developing a mission critical high performance system on top of a gigantic dataset by taking a purist “we only look at uses cases individually and ignore the system-level overview” approach (thus, ignoring the general project technical needs that are derived from the size of the data, data integrity and performance requirements) and let me know how well it goes when half way down the project you figure out your system architecture of a single application instance with a database that can’t handle distributed transactions can’t actually deliver on those requirements.
You can refactor code and low level design in a reasonable amount of time, but refactoring system level design is a whole different story.
Of course, in my experience only a handful of shops out there do proper Agile for large projects: most just do the kiddie version - follow the herd by doing famous “agile practices” without actually understanding the process, how it all fits in it and which business and development environments is it appropriate to use in and which it is not.
I could write a fucking treatise about people thinking they’re “doing Agile” whilst in fact they’re just doing a Theatre Of Agile were all they do is play at it by acting the most famous bits.
I really don’t think anyone is jumping in with zero analysis. Granted I have known some who will jump into something when its just a few words or even before its decided to go forward with a solution but over half the time what they do overnight provides decent info on moving forward or is helpful for gathering requirements. I mean im not blowing out my evening on a maybe but I respect the passion.
I would describe it as “insufficiently thinking about and researching the problems space”.
From what I’ve seen that’s very common because developers have a tendency to want to be hands-on rather than merely researching, myself include.
Even for the sake of figuring out inconsistent requirements or even just big gaps in the requirements, it’s a good idea to really think about it and cross check things.
Personally, the more I advanced in my career and the more complex and larger problems I had to tackle, the bigger the fraction of preparation time vs the fraction of coding time and I believe most very senior devs have the same experience.