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Comment by gujk | Hacker News Reader

"waterfall" was a made up term invented in a paper to describe a hypothetical development process, not an actual process.

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The term "waterfall" wasn't coined by Royce in his paper. His paper was a set of suggestions to improve what later became generally known as the waterfall process.

And Royce was ultimately advocating an iterative method (rather than a strict waterfall), not unlike most agile methods today, although his cycles were much larger.

If one is interested in software development methodology, I strongly recommend taking 15 minutes to read the actual "waterfall" paper[1].

Poor guy, Winston Royce is one of the most misunderstood folks in the industry.

(By the way, curiously enough, Royce's son William was a major contributor to the Rational Unified Process.)

[1] http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Process/wate...

He wasn't advocating iterative methods in the agile sense, in fact he calls for "complete program design" before any analisys or coding, along with intensive documentation, planning, controlling and monitoring. An iterative approach to development drops nearly all of those.

The graphic where he shows cycles going back stages is used to exemplify failure, which he proposes to fix via the strict practices above.

Or, he could be advocating the most agile process that the technology of the time (1970) would allow. Remember that there were no desktop computers, no internet, the programming language C was just being created.

Agile processes don't depend on technology, just people, paper and communication, in fact technology can be a burden sometimes.

Just in case someone from the future misunderstands this: I don't mean that agile drops analysis, documentation, planning or monitoring (they are essential to it) but it leaves the "intensive" and "before" parts out.

Development processes very similar to todays "agile" family, existed back in 1970. "Evolutionary prototyping" for example (a member of the "prototyping" process-family), is one of the precursors for todays agile practices.

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