DevOps | Project Management | Agile Waterfall's "Scope Creep" is Agile's Revelation May 10, 2025

Neil Chaudhuri

LinkedIn

I saw someone post this on LinkedIn: “How do you deal with scope creep in an agile software development project?”

I find this question so aggravating in 2025 that I just had to write a quick post about it.

When you set out to build a new product, you start with good faith assumptions that are unfortunately almost certainly wrong about what your customers want and what it takes to deliver that. As with any creative work, it’s inevitable.

Waterfall denies that reality and, despite unanimous evidence to the contrary, believes months or even years of methodical planning will avoid it. A reality so gross that waterfall labels it the same way we label the weird dude at the bar who won’t take a hint: creep.

Instead, agile (and lean) accepts that reality. It isn’t gross. It’s just that none of us are Steve Jobs. We will get things wrong. It’s OK. Even Tony Stark gets things wrong. Agile product development offers ways to minimize the fallout—namely experimenting fast to discover what you got wrong fast so you can pivot off the feedback fast and deliver the right thing. Fast.

So what waterfall calls “creep” is actually a welcome revelation of what the right path should have been all along if we had Jobs-ian clairvoyance at the jump, and agile helps us minimize the cost of our bad initial assumptions.