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Are there serious descriptions of these good-old-days software methodologies that the kids these days with their agile and their hippety-hop are corrupting? The

by bcoates 13y ago

Are there serious descriptions of these good-old-days software methodologies that the kids these days with their agile and their hippety-hop are corrupting? The story I've always been told is that 'Waterfall' is a pejorative invented by software methodology pitchmen to describe the ad-hoc process you get when you ask an MBA to build a software shop. As someone who's had a little bit of exposure to 20th century code, I'm not terribly impressed with it. It's neat that they managed to get anything at all done on such primitive hardware, but incredible feats of performance hackery isn't the same thing as software quality as we know it. Someone explain to me the lost methodology of these programmer-Titans who made this "truly excellent, reliable code"? p.s. Since when was the Internet a software product?

overgard 13y ago
Who says you need a methodology to create a good software product? (Answer: people selling methodologies). I've been on teams that have done "agile" and teams that didn't have any sort of named methodology at all, and I can't really find any correlation between that and the quality of their output. Frankly, it seems like it mostly comes down to how good the team members are, how good the managers are, and if they work in a good environment. (And the internet is definitely a software product: TCP/IP, BGP, routers, DNS, etc. etc. Compared to all that, running a few cables is nothing.)
peterashford 13y ago
Q.E.D
dragonwriter 13y ago
> Are there serious descriptions of these good-old-days software methodologies that the kids these days with their agile and their hippety-hop are corrupting? Yes; the references in the Wikipedia article on the Waterfall model [1] are good place to look. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model
- VintageCool 13y ago
  Per the Wikipedia article, the term "waterfall" has always been pejorative. It was first described in 1970 as "this is a software development model which doesn't work". Everyone that has ever sold a commercial software development methodology has sold it as "not waterfall".
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Per the Wikipedia article, the term "waterfall" has always been pejorative. That overstates what the Wikipedia article claims, which itself misrepresents the sources the article cites (e.g., the article it cites as the first use of "waterfall" does not use it in negative sense; it uses it descriptively -- while it does discuss the existence of a quality-of-requirements problem in software development (investigation of whether that perceived problem was real is the point of the paper), it doesn't place the blame for it on the waterfall model. Anyhow, my point upthread was that the sources cited in the article themselves are good if you want to understand the model of the time. (From those, it also looks like another good source would be MIL-STD 490 and/or MIL-STD 483, but I haven't had any luck finding them, the closest I've been able to find is MIL-STD 490A, which replaced 490 in 1985.)
  - parasubvert 13y ago
    And yet, we have plenty of IT departments that proudly claim "we are a waterfall shop".

by bcoates 13y ago

overgard 13y ago

Who says you need a methodology to create a good software product? (Answer: people selling methodologies). I've been on teams that have done "agile" and teams that didn't have any sort of named methodology at all, and I can't really find any correlation between that and the quality of their output. Frankly, it seems like it mostly comes down to how good the team members are, how good the managers are, and if they work in a good environment. (And the internet is definitely a software product: TCP/IP, BGP, routers, DNS, etc. etc. Compared to all that, running a few cables is nothing.)

peterashford 13y ago

Q.E.D

dragonwriter 13y ago

> Are there serious descriptions of these good-old-days software methodologies that the kids these days with their agile and their hippety-hop are corrupting? Yes; the references in the Wikipedia article on the Waterfall model [1] are good place to look. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model

VintageCool 13y ago
Per the Wikipedia article, the term "waterfall" has always been pejorative. It was first described in 1970 as "this is a software development model which doesn't work". Everyone that has ever sold a commercial software development methodology has sold it as "not waterfall".
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Per the Wikipedia article, the term "waterfall" has always been pejorative. That overstates what the Wikipedia article claims, which itself misrepresents the sources the article cites (e.g., the article it cites as the first use of "waterfall" does not use it in negative sense; it uses it descriptively -- while it does discuss the existence of a quality-of-requirements problem in software development (investigation of whether that perceived problem was real is the point of the paper), it doesn't place the blame for it on the waterfall model. Anyhow, my point upthread was that the sources cited in the article themselves are good if you want to understand the model of the time. (From those, it also looks like another good source would be MIL-STD 490 and/or MIL-STD 483, but I haven't had any luck finding them, the closest I've been able to find is MIL-STD 490A, which replaced 490 in 1985.)
- parasubvert 13y ago
  And yet, we have plenty of IT departments that proudly claim "we are a waterfall shop".