I used to work at a fairly big software company that was on about version 6 of a product with a 2 or 3 year ship cycle. They'd spent years trying to get away f

I used to work at a fairly big software company that was on about version 6 of a product with a 2 or 3 year ship cycle. They'd spent years trying to get away from the waterfall model, but there were still gaps on the order of maybe 8 months between ship cycles where the teams had nothing to actually work on. (To clarify, what does your QA team do while all of the PMs and architects are off designing stuff and devs are barely scratching out prototypes in the dirt?) As a result, they would have these planning drives where everyone would get mobilized to work out details for the next release's engineering system. Dozens of committees would be formed, meetings held, PowerPoint decks produced, the Director and his staff would hold tense weekly meetings and curse and growl at each other over graphs and spreadsheets of "progress". Then finally, the big day would come, day one of the new engineering system, and ----- crickets. A week later everyone would have forgotten the buzzwords and names of the initiatives and would be back to waterfall.