[GlennS]

I did read the whole thing - it was a really well written and enjoyable article. I did have to slog through though, because of the yellow on purple.

My favourite bits:

Waterfall as a expression of power and hierarchy within an organisation, something like: "I tell you, lowly worker, what to do" (my words).

This characterisation of a good client: "These are people who will be a pleasure to work with: they are forward thinking, attentive to detail, serious about this project, and have some idea of what it is they want their program to do."

The idea of a cultural conflict between people who value good design and want to spend time on it, and other who hold it in in contempt. Not something I'd thought about before, beyond some idea that the market doesn't demand quality, and so worth a chew over.

[sageikosa]

Actually the "waterfall" effigy defined in various manifestos was the revolt against civil engineering project managers who entered the software engineering field and believed that "building software" was like building a bridge, a skyscraper, or a sewer system.

The correct solution space wasn't to abandon dependencies and long range planning, but to recognize that software engineering is a specific type of process engineering that involves partially or completely automated processes.

Software doesn't describe the state of a machine in so much as it describes a process. Often developers don't recognize this so much because many of the terms have been concretized into the operating system (ie, process) and get thought of as a container for software instead of the representation of an automated process working in concert on shared resources.

And consequently software is complete when the process is well-defined and repeatable, not when things are bolted together.