A Real Waterfall Project

Having spent two decades as a software safety engineer I know that safety must start with system requirements which must then be supported throughout all architecture, design, implementation and verification activities. Safety cannot successfully be bolted onto a system as an afterthought. System safety impacts all aspects of system development, storage, delivery, maintenance and disposal. Success in implementing system safety requires planning and organization, not simple discovery.

I think they are three main aspects associated with waterfall that are each viewed as anti-agile: 1. Command-and-Control (as you said) but its a "double whammy" a. 'Command' as in formal authority, dis-empowered b. 'Control' not just as in 'controlling', but as in distrust-by-default, and a (presumed) intentional adversarial relationship with this both higher-up in tbe hierarchy, but also further 'downstream' 2. (Lifecycle) Phases - giving the (sometimes false) impression of non-holistic, non-iterative development at both the macro *and* micro-level. 3. Handoffs (especially end-of-phase handoffs), which are presumed to be NOT cross-functional (and therefore DYSfunctional) Put those all together and you have a continuing cascade of colliding co-conspirators in a resounding cacaphony of calamitous casualty often known as "death [march] by a thousand papercuts" This way of 'herding cats' results in a thousand 'hurting cuts!' ??

Interesting. For me, the concept implicit in the term "waterfall" is not command-and-control; it is define-once-and-execute. The assumption that is implicit is that the conditions will remain stable long enough to deliver. The explicit principle is that of stages in a linear progression. The fundamental characteristic that gives it its name is that there is no going back once say design is done. This is unavoidable for large objects. It will always be the challenge for building say a bridge. You only ever get to execute once. We are stuck with a waterfall It is more avoidable if we rethink how we build an object to break it down into smaller repeated pieces: floors of a skyscraper, lengths of highway, spans of elevated rail, multiple small power stations...