this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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A software engineer was not involved in this if waterfall is painted positively.
I think the last time I heard an engineer unironically advocating for a waterfall IRL was about a decade ago and they were the one of the crab-in-a-bucket, I-refuse-to-learn-anything-new types—with that being the very obvious motivation for their push-back.
Waterfall: Spend 10 years compiling written functional and technical requirements. Cancel the program due to budget overrun.
Yeah, waterfall would be "you collect requirements to build a rocket to Mars, 2 years later you have a rocket to Venus and it turns out they didn't think oxygen is essential, they'll have to add that in the next major release."
And here I am, running projects for the past 20 years mostly using agile, and still very much unconvinced about its supposed superiority over waterfall.
Yeah. It's wild!
Waterfall has been a negative term in software from it's very first use in software.
I know several who preferred waterfall, but the system I work on is a giant government one and when we were doing waterfall we were in specialist teams working on a small part of the system
At the same time we went agile management also said "everyone can do everything" so we've had to work across the entire system
For the rocket analogy: we started building a rocket under waterfall, but when we went agile we also decided that the rocket motor specialists could also work on fuel tanks and heat shields