Software Development Lifecycle

[Mich the Tester]

Waterfall 2006 - International Conference on Sequential Development

[original PM]

Kind of, obviously it needs to be done again or you wouldn't be doing it. If your firm does the same thing over and over again with very little variance then you can use the waterfall as a management tool to show you have followed the well worn procedure.

Yeah - i often fine that where there is a very rigid process in place people are simply going through the motions (is there a difference between following a rigid process and going through the motions??) simply to ensure that they do not get the blame for when the project goes wrong.

It is in essence everything that is wrong with a lot of projects and project managers right now.

[MarillionFan]

We are not being certain that this issue '535 Wrong sum total in price and sales tax calculation' is truly production blocking issue; please to be changing to minor or cosmetic change request.

PM - Let's review JIRA 369. MF this is with you.

MF - I failed it last week and the developer says that it is no longer on his priority list as he says he's done the fix. Of course it's a five minute change and of course if the same issue happens again in production the whole datawarehouse load will fail and we're fecked.

Developer - What are my prioritites please?

FFS!!!!

[Mich the Tester]

Yeah - i often fine that where there is a very rigid process in place people are simply going through the motions (is there a difference between following a rigid process and going through the motions??)

I've never had problems achieving the necessary rigidity to go through the motions with Lady Tester.

[original PM]

I've never had problems achieving the necessary rigidity to go through the motions with Lady Tester.

Yes but it's much more fun when you can add in a bit of your own initiative....

[Mich the Tester]

PM - Let's review JIRA 369. MF this is with you.

MF - I failed it last week and the developer says that it is no longer on his priority list as he says he's done the fix. Of course it's a five minute change and of course if the same issue happens again in production the whole datawarehouse load will fail and we're fecked.

Developer - What are my prioritites please?

FFS!!!!

Ah, just coincidentally I had an argument about HP QC 369 this morning; they've made a temporary workaround which works, in a workaroundy kind of way, and now want the issue closed so that the the agreed solution can only be built as 'being change request'.

[suityou01]

Others are suffering the same crap.

CUK as a concept works then. Well done admin.

[Spacecadet]

Are you savvy developers / PMs aware that the whole concept of 'waterfall' in software development was simply an academic misunderstanding?

Waterfall Accident

For those too lazy to read this, the relevant paragraph is: What we today know as the waterfall model comes from a paper with the title "Managing the Development of Large Software Systems", written in 1970 by Winston W. Royce. On page 2 it contains the famous diagram with the cascade starting at "System requirements" on the upper left, continuing on through "Program Design" and "Coding" down to "Operations" on the lower right.

But nobody seemed to notice that Royce does not promote this model. On the contrary, directly below he writes “… the implementation described above is risky and invites failure.” He then goes on to promote a different process: He recommends to “do it twice” by building a throw-away “pilot model” first to explore novel elements and unknown factors. Furthermore, in the introduction Royce admits that he has no data to back-up his ideas, he calls them "personal views" and "prejudices".

Somehow the intellectual lightweights of the time (project managers I'd expect) took the simple (but incorrect) solution as promoted it as the way forward and we have all suffered greatly since. Although some of you have invoiced well out of it I'd expect.

As Henry Ford said, thinking is the hardest work of all, which is why so few people do it.

There is more here as well:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring20.../waterfall.pdf

Includes every developers nightmare - Documenting the Design. Somethig which is missing from most projects and something I normally have to remind project managers to put in as it needs to go beyond simply spelling out what the software needs to do.
The design can normally be shaken down at the documentation stage with the end customer removing any silly design mistakes or assumptions

[d000hg]

Try operating an agile approach over a crackly telephone call with an off shore team with pidgin English.

Sometimes waterfall is the only way.

Strict waterfall is crap. I don't much care for strict, dogmatic Agile either. The general principle of Waterfall is OK as long as you remember it is an ideal, not 100% workable in reality. i.e. fixed specs for you offshore team to work to, less rigid in other areas such as feeding user testing back into development (aka a beta )

[NotAllThere]

I can't understand why an application that'll only be used at year-end must be "live" by July, so that the first time it's used with real data from real users, there will be no IT people on site. Nor why the output documents must be ready for testing by December, when testing them isn't scheduled until March.

But I just keep billing.