The author correctly sites construction as an example of how waterfall may have originated. But it was all of engineering that worked that way. It's called proj

The author correctly sites construction as an example of how waterfall may have originated. But it was all of engineering that worked that way. It's called project management. I was an automotive engineer when I graduated in '82. Then a plan was built working backwards from when the first car was due to roll off the line, usually about five years in the future. That would set milestones that would be pushed to all the teams and suppliers. We used critical path analysis to determine what activities had to be completed on time or the project would be delayed. Extra resources would be dedicated to tasks on the critical path. Maybe overtime or more people. So it is not surprising that in the early days software projects were treated the same way. Whenever I took over a project I would tear up my predecessor's plan and immediately start to build a prototype of the component. The plans would have no wiggle room for discovering a big oops years later. Did we choose the right materials? Will that mechanism work in the cold? I would do the first iteration myself, building the product our of wood or cardboard or plastic. Then I would move to a prototype hand crafted out of steel. Then I would order stamping tools made from Kirksite (zink) and test those versions before finalizing the design and committing to the final tooling. So, yes, iterative design/build works for physical systems too.