Hacker News Reader

Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

The ol all requirements up front -> design -> implement that people classically associate with waterfall came from an infographic on how not to do waterfall.

Actual waterfall looks very much like actual agile, in that it is designed around iteration loops. The primary difference is that waterfall prescribed steps in the iteration process, and agile is just a set of principles in a manifesto.

Edit: reference: https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/waterfall.html

TLDR: the original impetus for waterfall is basically what we call agile today.

Someone copy-pasted a random chart from a paper (one the paper specifically said was too problematic) into a DOD process spec, that turned into a standard because the DOD loves to standardize everything, and big companies all adopted the fundamentally flawed approach and called it waterfall.

View on HN

Most people know nothing about "Waterfall Model" which if you think about it, is just commonsense meta framework using which you can implement any SDLC methodology. Pair it with "Spiral Model" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model) and you are golden.

This excellent writeup by David Olson gives both the history and the correct understanding; The Myth of the 'Waterfall' SDLC - http://www.bawiki.com/wiki/Waterfall.html

Reading this subthread is wild. I worked for NASA earlier in my career. We never used the term waterfall, but the process described by that term is epitomized by large government projects, and NASA engineering culture in particular.

Most of what people are describing here would be unrecognizable to any government program office.

> Actual waterfall looks very much like actual agile, in that it is designed around iteration loops. The primary difference is that waterfall prescribed steps in the iteration process, and agile is just a set of principles in a manifesto.

In that case, I don't believe companies follow either. I've never seen anything as principled (in any form) practiced anywhere.

Companies claiming to do Agile were usually doing some rituals and cosplaying as agile. I don't believe I've ever seen a company doing "waterfall" or anything resembling what your link describes either.

They mostly do chaos-driven development.

> Actual waterfall looks very much like actual agile, in that it is designed around iteration loops.

No, Waterfall was not agile, it was the diagram from Royce but not what he recommended from his paper (which tore down that diagram). What Royce added to that diagram (fundamentally, just common sense with feedback loops) was closer to agile, though. Royce himself never called anything Waterfall, but what was termed Waterfall was the bad process he tore apart.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com