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AFAIK, waterfall was always a straw man meant to knock down. Nobody sane ever did a pure waterfall model. The model came from http://www-scf.usc.edu/~csci201/

AFAIK, waterfall was always a straw man meant to knock down. Nobody sane ever did a pure waterfall model. The model came from http://www-scf.usc.edu/~csci201/lectures/Lecture11/royce1970.pdf http://www-scf.usc.edu/~csci201/lectures/Lecture11/royce1970... and describes it as risky in that very paper. Notice diagram 2 (the waterfall), 3 (the dream) and 4(the reality). We had expensive agile consultants coming in a bit after 2000. They were telling us the current official process, RUP, was waterfall, and we were completely misguided. Of course, this was a typical management-saves-face move: Devs were asking for using RUP as described (i.e. more iterative), even if managers expressly forbade the use of agile processes up to that point. RUP as intended was basically doing 2 to 4 week iterations, each a mini-waterfall (thou shall not call them sprints). Somehow, expensive consultants delivered an agile more waterfall than RUP. The actual value from RUP was a clear description of who does what, who requires what, and how do we call each part of the process. The Agile consultants saw no value in this, and gave us service based service service services implemented by services. We had standups reused as meetings to find out if service was meant as ITIL/SOAP/process/micro/business/something nobody ever heard of. This distinction was important so we could fill in all the important agile documents, which were not meant to be read by anyone, but filling them in was the only way us lowly peasants would not stray from the true golden agile path. Oh well, if there is an ASCII code for the END-OF-RANT character, you can place it here: <<EOR>>

doctor_eval 4y ago
Ha, this is a good rant and I like it. Rational was all that and more in the 90s but ultimately AFAICT they were trying to make design into a coding exercise under a different name and with a fancy “language”; but that’s what code is for. Unfortunately my reality has been that some shops and some managers actually do believe that the process is design -> build -> deploy and that any errors or delays in step 2 are the engineering teams fault. I mean, they don’t say that bit out loud or anything.
mywittyname 4y ago
I remember working at a company whose "agile transformation" was a disaster, costing the company boat loads of money. After that, we used RUP because agile was a dirty word in that office. We even had posters and such on the walls praising RUP. Nothing actually changed. Standups became morning meetings, sprints were iterations, sprint review became feature review, and sprint planning became elaboration meetings.

doctor_eval 4y ago

Ha, this is a good rant and I like it. Rational was all that and more in the 90s but ultimately AFAICT they were trying to make design into a coding exercise under a different name and with a fancy “language”; but that’s what code is for. Unfortunately my reality has been that some shops and some managers actually do believe that the process is design -> build -> deploy and that any errors or delays in step 2 are the engineering teams fault. I mean, they don’t say that bit out loud or anything.

mywittyname 4y ago

I remember working at a company whose "agile transformation" was a disaster, costing the company boat loads of money. After that, we used RUP because agile was a dirty word in that office. We even had posters and such on the walls praising RUP. Nothing actually changed. Standups became morning meetings, sprints were iterations, sprint review became feature review, and sprint planning became elaboration meetings.