[Jtsummers]

Waterfall was a thing, it actually is a thing. It is a terrible thing. It is an idealized version of running a project that assumes you can actually plan everything out for the next 6-60 months with teams from 5-5000. I have only ever seen it work when the projects were small or the teams were experienced and working on a mature system.

"Work": I don't mean that the projects fail but that they fail in some aspect. Like they deliver late, or don't deliver the full requirements, or they don't deliver the real requirements (because the requirements were written 5 years ago by a consultant, this might be a total failure in many cases).

"agile" (not Big-A Agile the faddish cult) resolves a lot of this by one simple thing: frequent feedback between developers and customers while developing smaller increments. Which, ironically, was actually Royce's point in the paper: Feedback loops, not necessarily with the customer, need to be incorporated in order to develop large scale systems.

One of the issues in discussing this is that it turns out that when most people say "Waterfall" they mean a modified version. When you dig into what they're doing it's either a small modification (we bring the customer in during testing, which is good but that's still 4 years into the project) or a major modification (V-Model which incorporates all of Royce's feedback loops and then some). Others have gone to doing incremental & iterative development or evolutionary but still call it Waterfall because they don't know any other term.

But yes, Waterfall exists, it is a nightmare, and I hope to never be involved in it again.