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There Is No Such Thing as a “Waterfall” Project
The Phantom Protocol of Project Management
In project management, the so-called “Waterfall” methodology is often portrayed as a ghost from a bygone era, haunting the corridors of modern, agile-driven enterprises.
Investigate further, and you’ll discover a startling reality: Waterfall, as popularly criticized, never truly existed.
Its rigid, linear framework, touted as the antithesis of adaptable Agile methodologies, is a misrepresentation that has morphed over decades. The Waterfall methodology has become more of a myth, a cautionary tale, than a practice rooted in reality.
The concept delineated a sequential flow of activities. This meant that any phase in the development process began only after the preceding phase was complete.
Seminal criticism to the waterfall model for software development emerged from a paper by Winston W. Royce in 1970, where he pointed out the lack of flexibility inherent in a sequential approach. However, at that time, neither the method had been formalized nor the term “Waterfall” had been used yet.
Fast-forward to the 2010s
Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum, gained significant traction for their iterative and incremental approaches…
