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The "waterfall" method is comforting because it can be made to reflect a company's existing physical/organizational structure: work passes down the assembly lin

The "waterfall" method is comforting because it can be made to reflect a company's existing physical/organizational structure: work passes down the assembly line from Department A to Department Z and then it's done. And of course we'll meet our deadlines, because look, here they are right on the Gantt chart! So the illusion of control I think is convincing, more so than any Royce diagram.

deleted 17y ago
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spolsky 17y ago
I have no idea where you got the idea that reflects a company's physical or organizational structure. Not in any company I can think of. The most old-school company I can think of, say, Ford building cars, knows that the very process of building the factory will cause change in the design of the car, and they know that they're going to iterate the design, at least annually, which is something they've done since the 1930s.
- audionerd 17y ago
  Ok, to call it the "physical/organization structure" was probably too literal. What I'm getting at is what I've seen from waterfall, where responsibility is "handed-off" from department A to department B to department C and then it's "done". Managers use the waterfall phases to schedule each department's workload, so each team is essentially working in isolation. e.g.: "Requirements and Design" is one department, "Implementation" is another, "Verification" is yet another. (Design, Developers, QA)
  - LargeWu 17y ago
    This used to be the standard practice where I worked doing client web development. Random Fortune 500 Company is not going to buy into an iterative development process, because the person at the client company is usually some peon with little real power to adjust budget or requirements as necessary. That is, until it's too late, and their superiors are breathing down their necks because the website doesn't do what they didn't say it should do. Plus, if you don't use an iterative process, you can bill your client for massive change orders. So there's no real incentive on either side to change the process, unless both companies "get it" from the start that you can't make quality software this way. The likelihood of this decreases dramatically the larger the client.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

spolsky 17y ago

I have no idea where you got the idea that reflects a company's physical or organizational structure. Not in any company I can think of. The most old-school company I can think of, say, Ford building cars, knows that the very process of building the factory will cause change in the design of the car, and they know that they're going to iterate the design, at least annually, which is something they've done since the 1930s.

audionerd 17y ago
Ok, to call it the "physical/organization structure" was probably too literal. What I'm getting at is what I've seen from waterfall, where responsibility is "handed-off" from department A to department B to department C and then it's "done". Managers use the waterfall phases to schedule each department's workload, so each team is essentially working in isolation. e.g.: "Requirements and Design" is one department, "Implementation" is another, "Verification" is yet another. (Design, Developers, QA)
- LargeWu 17y ago
  This used to be the standard practice where I worked doing client web development. Random Fortune 500 Company is not going to buy into an iterative development process, because the person at the client company is usually some peon with little real power to adjust budget or requirements as necessary. That is, until it's too late, and their superiors are breathing down their necks because the website doesn't do what they didn't say it should do. Plus, if you don't use an iterative process, you can bill your client for massive change orders. So there's no real incentive on either side to change the process, unless both companies "get it" from the start that you can't make quality software this way. The likelihood of this decreases dramatically the larger the client.