[bigpicture]

The longer I work in this industry, the more I am coming to believe that waterfall is nothing more than a strawman set up to make development process X look like the Holy Grail.

Has anyone seen it in real life - in the pure form?

I once worked at a place that "did waterfall", but a diagram of the process would have shown arrows in all directions (would we call these things salmon runs or something?) and if you needed to go backwards only that specific piece did so while everything else continued as normal. Unit testing, integration testing, system testing, etc was all present on day 1.

[igouy]

> a strawman

"Figure 7. Step 3: Attempt to do the job twice - the first result provides an early simulation of the final product."

1970 "Managing the Development of Large Software Systems"

"Figure 3 portrays the iterative relationship between successive development phases for this scheme. The ordering of steps is based on the following concept: that as each step progresses and the design is further detailed, there is an iteration with the preceding and succeeding steps but rarely with the more remote steps in the sequence. The virtue of all of this is that as the design proceeds the change process is scoped down to manageable limits. At any point in the design process after the requirements analysis is completed there exists a firm and closeup moving baseline to which to return in the event of unforeseen design difficulties. What we have is an effective fallback position that tends to maximize the extent of early work that is salvageable."

http://www-scf.usc.edu/~csci201/lectures/Lecture11/royce1970...

[eikenberry]

Back in the 90s and early 2000s every company I had any experience with used some waterfall-like development model. The usual case had a 6-9 month release cycle, up-front requirements and some level of technical specification of the required work. No one did automated testing (testing was QA's job) and releases were painful. I'm guessing you just didn't start in the industry until after this practice was already dead.

[Gpetrium]

Companies and employees need to be able to sell the idea of a project/product/service to each other. The waterfall method serves as a bridge that connects the dots, allowing both sides to understand how they intend to reach the end goal.

The same way you haven't seen waterfall in its pure form, you will likely never see Agile, Design Thinking, etc in its pure form. That is because we are looking at environments prone to change and in control of humans with variable degrees of knowledge and prone to change.

What you have seen with the diagram that shows arrows in all direction is simple, it went against your perceived view or the standard and that put you off. Or, the person just didn't know how what they were doing (the more likely scenario).