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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

I don't think waterfall is actually used in other disciplines, perhaps we were just cargo culting back then?

But my question is: if SE is supposed to be based on a theory of project management, then what is the theory used in other disciplines? Or do project management not see that as their underlying theory, but rather something more hard like physics or chemistry?

It sounds like there must be a general field of project management out there...getting people to apply technical skills to get things done. It is probably a soft science, but definitely necessary. So why not talk about this aspect SE as a sub-field at that field rather than as an aspect of a more hard science (computer science)?

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> I don't think waterfall is actually used in other disciplines, perhaps we were just cargo culting back then?

I think this is half right. There was quite a bit of cargo-culting going on. But the fundamental error was to try to apply the project-management process for the construction of other kinds of artefacts to the design of software. I wrote about this very topic here:

http://www.zerobanana.com/essays/reclaiming-software-enginee...

You're correct that no other engineering discipline attempts to use waterfall-style project management of its design process. They don't really use it in the construction process either (in practice, design tends to continue alongside construction), though it probably has at least been attempted.

It was no surprise to see that the authors of this piece are in fact among the originators of the Rational Unified Process. They claim to have corrected their mistake; in fact they are still pushing the same wrongheaded ideas as they were in the 1980s.

"They don't really use it in the construction process either (in practice, design tends to continue alongside construction)..."

For something like a high-rise office tower, the design decisions you can change after construction is in progress are quite limited. For example, you can't add ten more floors to the building as an afterthought, since that would involve adding extra elevator shafts, emergency stairways, water and sewage lines, etc. that would cause significant disruption to the floors of the building that have already been built. Similarly, redesigning the layout of a floor to accommodate twice as many people would require similar changes to stay compliant with building and safety codes.

I suppose if you're constructing a single-family house, there's much more leeway to change the design during construction - but it would still be costly.

> I don't think waterfall is actually used in other disciplines

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model:

"The waterfall development model originates in the manufacturing and construction industries; highly structured physical environments in which after-the-fact changes are prohibitively costly, if not impossible. Since no formal software development methodologies existed at the time, this hardware-oriented model was simply adapted for software development."

> It sounds like there must be a general field of project management out there

Yes, project management is a discipline in itself. Why the article is calling its project management framework for software development "software engineering" is not clear. Probably because it sounds more promising; it promises to be the silver bullet:

http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf

Erm, how to put this delicately...it's difficult to design and construct a bridge or refinery in two-week sprints.

These are projects that span years--you bet your hat that they do that design work up-front and try not to make changes otherwise.

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