My new blog post deals with the "Waterfall" process model and how the first paper about it already highlighted its weakness. Unfortunately few people know about this, so let's change that!

You may know the "infamous" Waterfall model, which was supposedly invented back in 1970 in a paper written by Winston Royce and can be seen as some kind of the "arch enemy" of agile methodologies. The problem is just that this paper didn't advocate the Waterfall model! It identified the pattern, highlighting its deficiencies and suggesting improvements. These improvements actually contain some agile thoughts, such as "involve the customer"! Winston Royce has been totally misunderstood...

Unfortunately this fact is little known and even PhD lecturers in the field of Software Development Processes seem to be unaware of this fact, at least some of them that I know. That's why I dedicated a blog post to this topic. In this blog post I walk the reader through the original paper of Winston Royce. I show the deficiencies of the model, which he identified more than 40 years ago, as well as the improvements he suggests.

And the next time someone wants you to do Waterfall-style development, please tell them that Waterfall was just a big misunderstanding from the beginning ;-)