Did Waterfall Ever Exist?
Frank Booth
When was the last time you had a job title you didn't need to explain to your parents?
In 1956 Benington presented his phases of software development but doesn't mention waterfall. In 1970 Royce writes his article and doesn't mention waterfall. The US Defence Department Standards in 1985 codifying the workflow don't mention waterfall - so where does the name come from?
Is it important, people are talking about it, it must be real right? By this stage many good IT project managers have retired after a successful career using waterfall, but where is the proof waterfall isn't a collective dream?
By proof, I mean roots, global standards, a thesis (ideally one that doesn't mis-quote Royce). There may be some I've not seen ... I've looked but maybe they weren't uploaded to the internet. Perhaps it comes from a pioneer time when it wasn't important to document or even name such things.
Are there projects we can point to and categorically say this feature of waterfall methodology prevented disaster? Has it always been remarkable people who do that? I've known several remarkable project managers, I felt their individual values protected our projects.
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If there aren't standards and the name is a mystery; can we recreate what Waterfall is from a consensus; 'is' rather than 'is not'? If not, might we wonder if the term was coined by early agile folk collectively labelling behaviours it sought to replace, creating an outgroup and that label being the initial defining of 'the established way'.
It's easy to discount this article, believe the title is a pithy retort to the eternal question graffitied on my LinkedIn feed, but I am genuinely curious who called project management 'waterfall' before the 1990s?
I'd like to understand the common tenets of waterfall beyond Royce's boxes and arrows, has anyone got links to articles or books that help with the heritage?
Polyglot coder, data scientist and leader
7 个月The nomenclature is a bit of a mess, but before XP told everybody how silly they were being, most projects would write a detailed requirements spec, then a design (architecture) spec, then they'd do two weeks of coding before coming up with a better idea, be told the specs were closed, keep writing the old idea, hit loads of delays (cos they were turning down the nice surprises whilst suffering the nasty ones), abandon most of the features, end up with some bag of bones just before the money ran out, and declare it a huge success. That's not what Royce meant, but the name "waterfall" got hijacked to refer to what people did back then.
Guiding organizations into agility
7 个月"Waterfall" is a colloquial name for phase-gated ways of working where you can't move backward ("swim upwards") once you have passed a gate. The description fits all the planning-intensive project methods that were standard for software development projects two decades ago and still exist in many places.
Senior Business Consultant
7 个月Here is a brief history of software development, with a link to the 1976 paper by Bell and Thayer that first used the term waterfall. https://kallokain.blogspot.com/2023/11/waterfall-vs-agile-battle-of-dunces-or.html
Digital Program Director and Ways of Working expert
7 个月Waterfall was the standard operating method in corporations and is still around in most places. In the 80's at General Motors, we used a waterfall method called Method One from Anderson consutling, now Accenture. At a big Telco in the 2000s, we did a heavily defined waterfall method called the Technology Delivery Process with lots of Prince 2 phases and gates. That was installed by one of the big management consulting companies that claimed it was the NASA method. Even now, something like 90% of the organisations I see who are claiming to do Agile are actually doing waterfall with the dev and test team working in sprints. The people who control these methods dont call them waterfall but they often used the waterfall metaphor to decribe them. Perhaps because its so very obvious that that is what it looks and feels like. Now waterfall has become a negative term they call it something else like Prince 2 or TDP or the V Model. But its still waterfall.
DevOps Jester
7 个月No, there is no Mandela effect here. First, this thing, the waterfall approach exists. It has existed before it was described in Winston Royce’s article in 1970. It existed even though Royce didn’t use the soon to be infamous monicker. The term “waterfall” was first used to describe this phased approach in 1976 by researchers Bell and Thayer. Regardless the thing exists whether or not it has been named. Patterns are uncovered. Discovered. They aren’t created.