Tuesday  2004-03-30   Policy, Process, Mechanism

Death marches to the waterfall

Lately the waterfall methodology has been roundly criticized for being too heavy-handed and expensive. Developing in the Internet time meant waterfall was past sell-by-date by many a lifecycle. Needless to say for certain kinds of software waterfall methodology may be useful: for example desiging and implementing languages and their backwards compatible successors. However for the most commercial software development waterfall has been an embarrassing failure. The rise of agile methodologies (the most famous among them XP) seems to confirm the waterfall's disfavor among the technorati at last.

Or does it? Despite lip services paid to faster, nimbler software engineering practices, the industry hasn't changed its habit. Anecdotal evidences still depict wide spread analysis paralysis, slipping deadlines, worsening regressions, uncontrollable mutations, sinking morales and "death marches."