Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

An old person, who was around in the 1970s, looks back at the Waterfall process of software development.

The waterfall process. Of course the pure waterfall doesn’t work, that is why competent persons never used it.

Go way back when and realize that graphics programs (Paint, Draw, Misio) weren’t available. It was hard to draw lots of loops and arrows and such in software process diagrams. The Waterfall process was drawn as a downward steps because that’s all we could draw.

Everyone knew you went back and forth and back and forth. We just didn’t draw that picture because we didn’t have drawing tools.

Well, along came lots of incompetent people. They didn’t think much at work and they didn’t read the descriptions in books and papers. Instead, they looked at the one picture and did it that way. It didn’t work. Of course it didn’t work. No one with a  brain ever said it would work!

Reality doesn’t appear in a simple block drawing. Who ever thought it would?

So now we have lots of articles about today’s methods that begin by bemoaning our ancestors as stupid waterfall something or others. That is too bad because in some situations—and some of those situations still exist—the waterfall process is the most efficient one.