Waterfall
The term waterfall is most popularly associated with Winston Royce’s paper [http://web.archive.org/web/20230511154936/https:/www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf]. Back in 1970, Royce observed that the simplest model for software delivery was code and fix. Code and fix is what it sounds like – write code until you see a problem (likely a compile error), then code some more. While we laugh at this, it could be an appropriate style for, say, a complex spreadsheet where the customer, manager, and programmer are all the same person. That style might also work for a first-year computer programming assignment.
By the 1970s, software development was a big enough business to have programs supported by dozens of people. IBM’s system/360, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, had hundreds of programmers on staff. Even for much more modest projects, managers started to ask what seem like reasonable questions, such as the following:
- How much will this...
