Kay Pentecost wrote: > > BTW the gov't no longer enforces waterfall. It was > > all a bad dream. > > More. Tell me more. Please.
Sorry. I don't mean to tease. The downstream (!) effects of gov't support for waterfall will last for decades. You need to borrow Craig Larman's book, which is all the rage among Agilistas, called /Agile & Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide/. The first half is a very thoughtful, consistent, and well-organized contrast between Agile and the Waterfall-style systems. Craig read dozens of journal articles describing the summaries of enormous studies of hundreds of thousands of software projects. The conclusion is that all of them which did Waterfall sucked, in one way or another. Late, rework, over-budget, cancelled, etc. Two incredible findings - the teams that did Waterfall _loosely_ could excel over teams that did it _strictly_. And Big Requirements Up Front correlated with all the "big budget" disasters we hear of, such as $150 million and 8 years down the drain. Many failures derive from DOD-STD-2167, the infamous specification that required strict waterfall. This is in amazing contrast to all military experience fighting battles - don't follow a detailed plan if you are getting shot at. DOD-STD-2167, in the 1980s, lead to reports like "Out of a total cost of $37 billion USD for the sample set, 75% of the projects failed or were never used." (I'm wondering what the projects that succeeded and were never used looked like...) "only 2% were used without extensive modifications". DOD-STD-2167A removed the waterfall requirement, but kept all the same verbiage. Then, in '94, MIL-STD-498 replaced it with a completely iterative model. That means, for the past decade, all of you on government contracts should have been using incremental releases and incremental requirements gathering. ===== Phlip http://industrialxp.org/community/bin/view/Main/TestFirstUserInterfaces __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail To Post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ad-free courtesy of objectmentor.com Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
