Waterfall
Waterfall is something of a swear-word in Development these days. It's widely considered tha
// image of waterfall techniques
Having large cycles in a waterfall project of many months or many people has been shown to be a recipe for cost and budget overruns. But, the same techniques underpinning Agile
You can see the priority Waterfall places the risks by observing the order of the steps:
It's likely that the Waterfall-Style methodologies were inspired by the construction industry, wherein we try to [Design Up Front] in order to avoid the cost of re-work: once concrete is poured, it's expensive to change it again, compared to the cost of updating the design in a diagram. In the same way,
In any construction project, there are likely to be lots of stakeholders - landowners, neighbours, government, clients and so on.
Waterfall tries to mitigate this risk by getting Sign-Offs as it goes along.
When Waterfall was originally conceived, automated testing techniques were not well established. If you expect to perform a large manual testing cycle for each release, then clearly, few releases looks cheaper on paper.
According to the Wikipedia article,
- As shown in the diagram above, the software process is broken into distinct stages, to be carried out one-after-another.
- At the end of each stage is a sign-off, where the results of the stage are completed.
What risks does it prioritise?
- [Technical Debt]
- Prototyping: Picking a particularly high-risk part of the project (such as UI elements) and delivering it first.
- Business Case: Adding a stage in the at the start of the project to perform some benefits calculations.
- Cycles: Delivering in multiple, incremental stages.
(list of main features)
- like building a house
- Requirements Capture
- Design
- Implementation
- Verification
- Maintenance
- Sign Offs at each stage
