[valuearb]

I once ran a 45 person dev organization that used waterfall to ship a half dozen commercial applications a year, including dozens of localized and enhancement versions, and never missed a ship date over five years. And won numerous industry awards.

It can be done with waterfall.

[Jtsummers]

This raises several questions:

1. How experienced were these people in the particular problem domain?

2. How long was a single development effort and how many people?

3. What do you consider Waterfall? Are we talking "pure" Waterfall where everything is truly done in set phases? Or do you have feedback loops in place, like testing integrated properly into the development phase?

4. What was the relationships like with customers? Was it one (or a small number) of consistent customers or a diverse set of customers (closer to contract/bespoke software work)?

[valuearb]

1) Pretty young work force, we essentially trained everyone who came in.

2) typical team was 2-3 devs, 1-2 QA, project manager, product manager. Typical dev time was 6-9 months.

3) Waterfall has a pretty amorphous definition, our implementation not very pure, which is probably why it succeeded. Each component of a new release would start testing as soon as engineers had something testable. When all components passed QA we’d go into alpha, then beta.

4) It was consumer software, specifically targeted to graphics professionals on Mac/Windows. We had hundreds of thousands of customers, and delivered physically in floppies and CD Rom.

[carlsborg]

Thats impressive, was it your shop?

[valuearb]

I built the process. Or should I say, we built the process to best meet the specific requirements for our products and customers, as communicated by our product marketing team.

Our main strength was actually our Product Management director. He was excellent at collecting and communicating highest priority customer requirements. He was always questioning and pushing, and helping my engineers come up with better approaches and implementations.

He was also excellent at building external relationships do we had really good partnerships, and training/leading team PMs so they were good team leaders. He was so damn good at it they eventually he moved in from our little company to run all mobile for a $100B+ company.