Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctor_eval | Hacker News Reader

> Waterfall doesn't mean not to iterate

Technically, that’s exactly what it means. The entire design is signed off and completed before the implementation starts, and there is no feedback loop.

But waterfall itself was a straw man in a paper intended to recommend a much more complex process. It’s more than ironic that it became seen to be a valid process in and of itself.

(Sadly I’ve lost the link to the original paper, but if I find it I’ll update my comment)

> Besides, waterfall is just the straw man of scrum zealots.

The irony is that scrum itself is often just a wrapper for a waterfall process with all the problems it comes with. So many corporate implementations of scrum are AINO - agile in name only. Management that doesn’t understand the complexity of software is doomed to oversimplify it.

That said, if you are working iteratively - one feature at a time, with feedback - then whatever you call it, that’s not waterfall.

View on HN

> The irony is that scrum itself is often just a wrapper for a waterfall process with all the problems it comes with

I worked as an external employee in an environment that had a very functional scrum implementation. You had groomings, plannings, dailys, retrospectives. Every task was defined, estimated, time on them tracked to get better in estimating. You had scrum masters, capacity plannings. On the surface, it was all very functional and productive.

But the reality is, business analysts and product managers who had little knowledge of how the system works were in charge of talking to clients, writing specifications, getting them approved and ready for development, and very little possibility to iterate if there was a problem in the definition.

It was very efficient at building a bad product. :D

Yes, exactly this.

I saw a quote recently from Erik Dietrich that said, "A lot of people mistake activity for productivity” and that describes every scrum implementation I’ve ever seen.

It’s a cargo cult, no doubt in my mind.

Winston Royce actually did have an iterative process as part of Waterfall, it was in his final model, and the diagram was on the next page of the document that most people fail to recognise.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/1970_Roy...

My recollection from the paper is that he presented what’s typically discussed as waterfall at the start of the paper, and from there developed the iterative process.

Neither process was explicitly called “waterwall” - and the former is what I was taught at software engineering school.

Royce's model wasn't Waterfall. Waterfall is the model he started with, knocked, and then improved on. Idiots in DoD (and from there industry) mistook his first figure as the target, and not the thing to avoid. They codified it in a standard and it has been the cause of much government and government contractor waste ever since.

> But waterfall itself was a straw man

I disagree. I've been in many projects which looked exactly like the stereotypical waterfall, with the expected results (delays, death marches).

Originally in the W. Royce article from the 70s it was a strawman put up by Royce. He then went on to define much more reasonable iterative model.

Unfortunately the strawman was what started getting traction.

You misunderstand, the idealised waterfall model was literally presented as a straw man.

The horror is that it got picked up as a legitimate SDLC. Hence your exposure to it.

It’s almost like they saw the pictures and didn’t read the words.

Yes, the person that invented the name couldn't possibly imagine anybody was stupid enough to practice that thing he described.

At the same time, that process he described was the standard procedure for government and any large corporation contracts.

This is it, I distinctly recall a reading a paper defining Waterfall as a thought exercise, with the author coming back years later to clarify that there can never be such a thing in software development. The Wikipedia article for "Waterfall model" mentions something like that as well. As an old teacher used to say, "There's no such thing as a Waterfall model, it was your parents all along. All software development is iterative."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com