Comments on: Don’t draw diagrams of wrong practices – or: Why people still believe in the Waterfall model

By: Kevin Dahlhausen

Kevin Dahlhausen — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:55:05 +0000

Regarding referencing papers without reading them – this sounds somewhat similar to hungarian notation in that what the paper said is not at all what people commonly believe.

Thanks for a great article.

By: Methodik, Konzepte, Ideen, Projektmanagament – 2009-12-18 | duetsch.info - GNU/Linux, Open Source, Softwareentwicklung, Methodik und Vim.

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:47:16 +0000

[...] Don’t draw diagrams of wrong practices – or: Why people still believe in the Waterfall model Wäre Peteris Krumins meine Mathelehrer gewesen und hätte ich mir damals mehr Mühe gegeben, wer weiss [...]

By: Elsewhere, on December 11th - Once a nomad, always a nomad

Elsewhere, on December 11th - Once a nomad, always a nomad — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:55:17 +0000

[...] Shared Don’t draw diagrams of wrong practices – or: Why people still believe in the Waterfall model. [...]

By: Unomi

Unomi — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:05:30 +0000

It’s common (sense) that in communication you have to avoid the negative tense of a message. Because the only part the audience will remember is the ‘do’ part instead of the ‘do not’ part. If you say: “There is not an pink elephant in the room”, people will picture a pink elephant in the room and try to get rid of it in their mind. This scaping of a virtual mindset is very dangerous if the audience is not able to get rid of the view that is created. So, don’t try to picture something if you have to remove the same mindset later on to convince people of your message. Especially if the audience loses concentration and forgets the last part of your message to get across. You never get a second chance to a first impression is a very very good example of this principle.

- Unomi -

By: Every manager I ever met

Every manager I ever met — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:53:56 +0000

Hey thanks a lot for the article! Sounds like the Waterfall is what we want! Agile and Extreme sound scary. Waterfalls are nice.

By: John Walton

John Walton — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:25:24 +0000

My problem with this article is it lacks references to support claims. I’ve heard for years that waterfall methods fail regularly and agile rarely fails, but nobody has data supporting the claim, or a definition of what constitutes success and failure. As a manager who has used multiple methodologies including waterfall and agile, I can say that the methodology needs to fit the life needs of the product being developed, and also that a lot depends on how well a methodology is executed. Hardcore waterfall might be viewed as tyranny. Unfortunately, many shops actually follow the extreme anarchy approach of just code and test. In reality, an iterative approach like agile is almost always used that falls somewhere between anarchy and tyranny.

By: Introduction to the case #myyrmanni - identity solving of the suicide bomber 2002 « Netcrowds

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:59:01 +0000

[...] After Tianamen 1989, Seattle 1999 and Manila 2001, this #myyrmanni case was the very first what kicked me off: is there some kind of pattern with these cases, or inside the cases some phases like project-based coordinative actions or so? For example, Tarmo Toikkanen has the brilliant blog marking about waterfall project model and its quests. [...]

By: Thomas O. Powell

Thomas O. Powell — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:27:54 +0000

I love agile. Been working on a agile project for the last 3 months. No one knows what the product is supposed to do, beyond a handful of glittering generalities, but we have six people currently working on use cases for a logon screen (two weeks so far). Last project was a waterfall. We designed hardware, wrote 15,000 lines of code, built, tested, and delivered a customer certified product in 6 months. Think I will get back to writing more use cases. Less stressful, same pay.

By: Paul Coddington

Paul Coddington — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:26:37 +0000

“What does the waterfall have that the iterative does not? It has a means to provide and estimate BEFORE the work is done!!! With the iterative process the user-community/customer/project manager does not have any way of knowing how much the development will cost?.. until it is finished (which it NEVER IS).”

Not quite – there is a stage where a project becomes ‘good enough’ for development to stop.

But the real flaw in the thought process behind waterfall is this – assuming it is worth spending several times the amount of money extra to know in advance how much money you are going to spend. This alone is enough reason to go agile, but when you consider that the method consistently leads to failure, well…

I wonder if people who like this model would also spend $150 for an extra 1 year warranty on a $200 DVD Player?

By: Porttiteoria

Porttiteoria — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:18:06 +0000

[...] tässä yhteydessä vesiputousmalli siten, kun se on linkatussa wikipedia-artikkelissa selitetty. Tarmo Toikkanen kertoo kiinnostavasti, kuinka malli julkaistiin alun perin esimerkkinä toimimattomasta prosessista, mutta [...]

By: Psyc+Tech » Blog Archive » Failures of the scientific method and the waterfall method (again)

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:05:06 +0000

[...] and the waterfall method (again) Tags: Software development, Technology, waterfallI originally discussed the waterfall method in a previous blog post. Pranav just made a comment that I feel needs some further discussion: I [...]

By: Pranav

Pranav — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 06:01:51 +0000

Hi,
I disagree with the following statement: “This is how science (unfortunately) often works – researchers just cite something, because everyone else does so as well, and don’t really read the publications that they refer to. So eventually an often cited claim becomes “fact”.”

I would like to say that this is generally not how science works. Claims(predictions) made by any scientific theory is verified by multiple laboratories/people over a period of time and they are always falsifiable.

The problem with software development is that it is not based on a scientific theory yet (I am not talking about computer science here, only softwarre development). It has been said many times that it is more of an art than science.

By: chris clarke » Origins of Waterfall Software Development

chris clarke » Origins of Waterfall Software Development — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 19:13:10 +0000

[...] The story goes that somehow Royce’s initial diagram of a process which did not work was adopted as what we now know as the ‘waterfall model’. And was later adopted as a US Department of Defense standard (DOD-STD-2617) in 1985 and shipped across Europe in to Government and Defence projects though NATO. [...]

By: Tarmo Toikkanen

Tarmo Toikkanen — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 13:54:38 +0000

Thomas, I’m sorry to disappoint you by agreeing with you. I should really reread the article with more thought. I appreciate your insights into the article, and your interpretation is most likely more correct than my view, which was aimed to be a bit provocative. This is the problem in popularizing science – you need to cut corners and simplify, otherwise your message gets hidden underneath all the details.
But maybe now in the grand new blogosphere there are people who actually can take the time to study an issue in-depth. Maybe I’ve been working in the printed press for too long and learning to simplify towards my biased message. Sigh… Unlearning is always such a drag.
Back to your comment: You’re right in that I’ve drawn a distorted conclusion from the article. Instead of saying that the linear model was “just to show it doesn’t work” I should refer to it as something like “an intermediary step towards an iterative model, which he considers to be the one people should use”.
But the essence of my message still stands, I think. The decades following Royce have seen the emergence of the waterfall method, and most articles about it refer to Royce 1970. And for Royce this linear model was just step 2 (”more grandiose than step 1″) in his 10 step introduction to refining your software development process.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 10:04:46 +0000

Sorry but your own opinion is biased as well (surprise surprise). On the one hand you complain about the inadequacy of scientific citations about the waterfall model (”researchers just cite something, because everyone else does so as well”), which is probably true but on the other hand you fail to acknowledge that Royce himself has written his paper on a scientific basis. He is building the model gradually, resulting in fig.10. This is not surprising at all due to the date the paper was released. Royce gives an insight of his reasoning how he came up with the last model instead of just saying “Hey, tonight I had this dream, check figure 10 (you dont need figures 1 to 9 though)”. He does not claim at any point in the paper that someone should use the “simplified” model, he does suggest however to use the one on the last picture. So he didnt use the “simplified” waterfall model as a basis to show “a process that simply does not work” but as a basis to further improve the process he started to develop (starting simply with analysis/coding on page 1). So its distorting to conclude that he built a model just to show it doesnt work (implying a deliberate seperation of the paper in two parts). Another example for your distorting view is that he does not call the process of fig.2 “grandiose” but “MORE grandiose” (than the previous one) which, of course, changes the meaning significantly.

I know you will probably disagree, which is the nature of such a debate

By: Devon

Devon — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 20:13:19 +0000

I stumbled on this site while looking for research on the effectiveness of the waterfall model and of CMM (Capability Maturity Model). I had assumed for years that everyone knows the waterfall is a poor practice and I recall a study that found no correlation between CMM level and software quality.

So, imagine my surprise, after starting a new job, to find myself in a large organization where the waterfall is accepted as the default model for software development. I’d like to marshal some arguments to counter this assumption but would prefer to base them on empirical evidence – that’s just the kind of guy I am.

Can anyone point me to any studies addressing the effectiveness of either of these? Of course, I’m open to all valid evidence, pro or con.